Car ferries
 

Carvair was built out of DC-4. It kept the wing and engines, but the nose was replaced with a bigger one, including nose door and cockpit up in the hump above nose door - the prototype for 747.

There are said to be a number of propeller car ferries.

Can widebody jetliner holds be used as car ferries? Like B747, B767, A380?

I gather that the holds are low. Maximum height of 163 cm, for all widebodies between 767 to 747.

This means that sedans can be put in holds, and so can limousines - but SUV-s and most crossovers are too high. Rolls-Royce is barely low enough.

Do passenger airlines normally offer car tickets?

I believe that Lufthansa cargo had a daily 747F from Frankfurt to ? USA during the 70s and 80s on behalf of Volkswagen, so in effect that was a car ferry. I'm sure that they used both decks or at least a palletised double-decker.

Also, some of the Arab princes have been rumoured to have transported cars and horses around in DC-8s/747s in the past

Regards


SHJ

Various a/c have staged through Manch/EGCC/MAN. Including C130s for collecting Various Rolls Royce Limos for the Saudi Royal Family.

The Bristol Freighter...BR31 [Short Nose] and the BR32 [Long Nose] were crossing the English Channel [James Bond "Goldfinger"] and the Irish Sea.
Silver City Airways.....
watp iktch

Didnt BAF run a CL-44 on cross channel car ferry flights for a short while?

Once saw a Morgan being loaded into the front cargo hold on G-VXLG on LHR-JFK run

BAF CL-44s were certainly flying Stansted - Ostend in the early 1970s. Swing tail loading I think. G-AZIN was one from memory.

CL44 Air Ferries
 

According to http://www.cl44.com/cl44/Operators.htm ;

I've seen an episode of BBC's "Airport" where they are loading a Mercedes onto an A340-but from what i can remember it wasn't easy!

In addition to the Lufthansa operation for VW described above there was another operation in the 1980s by Alitalia and Lufthansa 747 freighters for Cadillac; cars were built under contract in Italy and shipped near-complete from Turin to Detroit. They were stacked at 45 degrees nose-down, there were 56 cars on each flight.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1987-1...c-allante4.htm

Alitalia did the same thing from Turin, I'm sure I've seen a diagram with the cars loaded in special stackers.

Quite a few cars get carried ex Abu Dhabi in the holds of the EY A330/340 and B777.

One of the a/c had to return to stand the other day because the car alarm went off in the hold and the noise was too great in the cabin!!

Surprised this one hasn't been picked up in Jet Blast yet:

Once had to offload from the hold of one of our 747s a nice Mustang convertable. The aircraft was on delivery from Seattle and the car belonged to one of our guys who was retiring back to the UK.
D

Over the past 3 years I have loaded/unloaded the following ...

E-type Jaguar
Chinese Formula A1 car
Ferrari F3000
Rolls Royce two-door
Subaru Imprezza
David Coulthard's F1 car
a Bugatti 'shell' on wheels (almost complete car, no engine, no steering wheel)
A Dodge Viper (I think) for the Gumball 3000 Rally
Ferrari F430
A Maserati 'thing'
Lotus Esprit

These were mostly on A.330s and B.747s, althought the Bugatti was on a A.340-600.

These were all 'one-offs', just a single car on a passenger flight, in the below-deck hold.

To be honest, they're both 'interesting' and 'a pain' to handle. All the above had to be placed nose-in, then turned through 90 degrees. This means undoing all the strapping, moving the car and then re-doing the strapping. I think that it took 20 people to turn the Rolls Royce :eek: .

Air ferry operating in 1960
 

In July of 1960 I took my second flight. It was on an air ferry from Cherbourg to Southampton. If I remember correctly, the plane held 3 cars and 15 passengers. I think it was a converted DC-3 or -4.
Does anyone out there know the carrier or the equipment that was in use at that time? Thanks.

Checking the descriptions, all widebodies bigger than B767 - A330, B747, B777 - have just 318 cm wide floor. Which means that a Tata Nano or a real Austin Mini could be placed across the plane (replacing one pair of LD3 containers) but a bigger car has to be placed along the plane. And turned at the door.

The door widths are 264 cm in 747, and 269 to 272 cm on B777, A330, A340... Finding the space to turn the car would be tricky.

The airline was Silver City who had a small operation out of Southampton and the aircraft was a Bristol 170 Freighter

http://www.airteamimages.com/63212.html

I did this in 1958 or 1959. My dad took cine film of it, which he still probably has. Great fun.

I must say I thought we went from Southend, but I was only 10 or 11 so I might be misremembering.

Our family (Anglo-Belgian) regularly used the BAF service Southend to Ostend and I can clearly remember (early 1970s) watching 3 or 4 cars being loaded on and then us sitting in the cabin behind - presume on a Carvair. I can even remember horses neighing once durinig the (often very bumpy) flight across the Channel. Fond memories! We stopped using the route around 1975 because it was something like £12 return by then and we couldn't afford it!

There is a regular service with Antonov's from Leipzig (LEJ) to Russia for Porsche Cayenne SUV's.

This is how the shipper ensures that they really arrive at their final destination in Russia and don't get lost en route.;)