Wonderful article at Men's Vogue about Freight Dogs:
Frequent Fliers
Let's say you're the captain of a Boeing 747 freighter - a "whale" in cargo-pilot patois - out of Anchorage for Chicago. Except no self-respecting cargo pilot calls himself - or, rarely, herself - anything so leaden, so utterly earthbound. You are instead, proudly and defiantly, a "freight dog," a nom de guerre freighted, so to speak, with many connotations, not all of them positive.
As you pull onto Runway 6 Right at Anchorage and advance the four throttles to maximum power, air traffic control advises there's a welter of severe turbulence on your climbout. A passenger airliner might give it a wide berth, but you, with a load of time-sensitive cargo, barge right on through. Then the turbulence hits and all hell breaks loose. The whale is batted about the sky like a shuttlecock. "Shit, hang on guys," your flight engineer says. Then: "Whoa...We lost something." The radio crackles, "Ah, four-six-echo-heavy, Elmendorf tower said something large just fell off your airplane."
Something large? The National Transportation Safety Board later determines that your 747 experienced "an uncommanded left bank of approximately 50 degrees" along with amusement-park pitches, rolls, and yaws that ripped the Number 2 engine clean off the wing. While all of this is happening, perhaps you, the captain, flash to Ernest K. Gann's classic Fate Is the Hunter, beloved among freight dogs for its vainglorious pilot prose: "We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand."
A bit more:
It's a culture that represents the last gasp of the ass-kicking, globe-trotting, hell-for-leather pilot worldview. Brutal labor relations, increasingly automated aircraft, and the dispiriting post-9/11 environment have torched whatever adventure and romance remain in aviation. But freight dogs never got that memo. Yes, they bitch endlessly about the hours, the food, the lack of sleep, the death-trap airports of Asia Minor and West Africa.
But talk to true dogs for more than five minutes and they betray themselves as hopelessly, permanently, passionately in love with flying and the particular esprit that hauling cargo allows. "All I ever wanted to do is fly," says Tom Satterfield, an MD-11 freighter pilot. How much? Satterfield worked as a successful chemical engineer for 20 years before chucking it to become a freight dog when he was 41. Who among us can declare without a trace of irony that we absolutely love our work? I wanted to know why freight dogs did. So I flew to Florida and hung around Miami Springs, the honky-tonk 'hood near the Miami airport that has been a freight-dog stronghold for more than 50 years.
And some more:
The cargo itself is comprised of incomprehensible quantities of the mundane - 160,000 pounds of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto video games - but also a full-size armored truck filled with four tons of Euro banknotes; a pair of experimental Lamborghini Countachs; a Sikorsky 76 helicopter for the Sultan of Brunei's nephew; Michael Schumacher's Formula 1 Ferrari; 120 tons of Beaujolais Nouveau; enough condoms to choke a specially chartered 747 to Rio for Carnival; an MD-11 filled to the gunwales with Victoria's Secret lingerie; crates of red party balloons stamped I VOTED NEW LABOUR; a U.N. airlift of 186,000 pounds of blankets for earthquake survivors in Islamabad; a mysterious ice chest, insured for $2 million, that turned out to contain the first HIV drug cocktail.
Then there is the livestock: whales; thoroughbred racehorses; rhinos; dairy cattle; giraffes; elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which escaped and got behind the captain's rudder pedals); ducklings (ditto); a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live crickets destined as feed for the world's zoos; an RAF police dog en route to Singapore for treatment of an abscessed molar - he tore apart his crate and went after his handler, who barricaded himself in the cockpit while the crew donned oxygen masks, depressurized the plane, and waited for the dog to pass out from hypoxia. Or the luckier dog, the only cargo on a 747 freighter from Chicago to Tokyo, that was released from his cage to play Frisbee catch with the pilot in the cavernous, empty cargo hold and was later photographed, in an homage to freight dogdom, sitting at the captain's station, paws on the control yoke.
A great read and it sounds like these people would be a lot of fun to have a beer with...
