The Anchorage airport is a major international flight hub, especially for freight. I ride by the airport often, and can always tell when something interesting is flying when there’s lots of folks parked along the runways at the viewing points. Yesterday and the day before there were tons of folks parked, and so I looked around and there were two Dreamlifters, with twice the body height Of a normal 747. Last week there was that huge Antonov, a Russian plane. I’m not an airplane fan, but these things are cool. But I don’t know much about them. What’s up with these things and what are they transporting that requires such big planes?
On the Antonov aircraft. A few years back I had to charter two of them to transport a group of helicopters to a western African country, the helicopters were then used to transport voting booths all across the country to remote villages and then a few weeks later all had to be returned. Had to get US State dept clearance and a whole bunch of fun things
There are two large Russian cargo's. One is like C5 big. The other, bigger. They haul big ass stuff with them.
That Dreamlifter is almost as ugly as the Airbus beluga. From the wiki: It is an extensively modified Boeing 747-400 that is used exclusively for transporting Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft components to Boeing's assembly plants from suppliers around the world. So there you go: Planeception.
I saw that Antonov take off. Memorable. Unique looking thing, and huge. Wheels right at the bottom of the fuselage, not on struts, and on the ground the wings droop markedly. Notwithstanding its massive size, it didn’t lumber up into the air, it basically Just rolled and jumped up off the runway and had good elevation by the time it crossed the road at the end. Must have been empty? I’m not a guy to watch planes take off or land but that was cool. I used to see the Pregnant Guppy, and Super Pregnant Guppy at the Van Nuys airport, kind of by where Kal Gard used to be. Big prop planes made to carry Saturn parts to Cape Canaveral. As big as they were, those things would go inside one of these modern jet powered big planes.
The pandemic has caused alot of airlines to permanently retire a bunch of 747s and A380s early unfortunately
In a video I may have posted in the YouTube thread featuring a bunch of hairy landings in extremely windy conditions, there is an Antonov doing an unintentional stoppie for a brief moment of time. Quite a sight.
Did you get any swag from doing business with them? We chartered flights with them to hotshot some fairings from FL to CA and back a few years ago. The crew has scale models of the plane on board that they sell to their customers.
Google the video "vodka burner "it is a fully loaded russian 11-76 taking off in Australia .They use every inch of the runway. The controllers can not even believe it .
The dreamlifters are carrying wing sections from Nagoya and possible fuselage sections too. Of course they only stop in Anchorage for fuel and a new crew.
No swag. I didnt' fly in them. We were previously doing business with a General in this country ( Everyone there is a General, Captain or Priest of some sort) He mentioned the diffulties they faced with bringing these cargo sized containers all around the country using traditional trucks that contained voting booth equipmemnt for an upcoming election. I mentioned "why not use a helicopter crane?" " I work with plenty of Heli operators that move big construction equipment to very remote areas. He thinks it can work so I start making my calls to my operators to see who can do it. The easiest way to get these big helis to Africa from the US was to charter a pair of 225's to come out, load up the Heli's and fly them over the Atlantic. But they couldn't land in the country so we had to route for Morocco. A few days before the sheduled trip the owner of the Helis gets me on video conference call and explains that he's been everywhere and has moved everything imaginable on the globe but if him and his crew get there and the containers have "Drugs, guns or people in them, the shit is gonna hit the fan starting with you!!"