Summer vacation had been great in the house in the south of France, but it was time to get back to work.
All over Europe and the Spanish Islands, charter passengers were packing the airports serving the traditional summer destinations. It was the high season for tour operators “shipping” customers to exotic places to enjoy sun, exotic cocktails and the sandy beaches around the med.
(A Flying Tiger DC 8/63 similar to the airplane used to carry " a bunch of pigs")
Passenger charter airlines were flying their entire fleet.
Air Belgium, European Air Transport, Trans European, Conair, Maersk, all of these guys were making big bucks as summer simply did not want to come to an end and Northern Europe had been severely deprived of sun.
Tiger's Charter Department had called me asking for the coverage of an animal flight from Nantes in the west of France to Sao Paulo, in Brazil and I was amazed that the company would entrust me with such a delicate mission.
I had never covered any such flight alone before and although I had participated in a couple of such missions, I felt grossly unprepared for the heavy responsibility of setting up the cabin of a DC8-63 for animal transport.
The plan was to fly from Nantes to Rio with a fuel stop in Santa-Cruz, Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and a crew change in Rio. A fresh crew would take the airplane from Rio to Sao Paulo and stay with it all the way back to Los Angeles.
(An A/C unit, providing air conditionned to airplane while on the ground. Pariority was to passenger flights...)
The charter briefing indicated that if the airport authorities in Nantes had already received the portable light aluminium pen system, they did not have the required tar paper nor the polythene film to protect the airplane floor so my first task was to go to a shop in the north of Paris, buy the required supply and arrange for their transport to Chateau-Bougon (1)
Using my experience of the previous flights I had witnessed accompanied by more experienced loadmasters, I did my best to set-up the pen system.
First of all, the 18 positions in the airplane would each receive a 125 x 95 airplane cargo pallet which was locked in position.
Then from position 1 all the way back to position 18, rolls of tar paper were unfolded. It was then time to cover the entire flooring with a thick polythene film and regularly place thick sheets of absorbing material, thus preventing urine to drip onto the airplane floor during the flight.
Then came the time to set up the 11 compartments pen system, spread over the entire cargo and tying it down securely. Like a corral used in “real life”, the various compartments could be closed through a system of doors or gate. The best part of it was spreading wood chips, or absorbant pellets all over the pens. It was usually the last task before the boarding of the "passengers".
Animal transport is submitted to various regulation: USDA, IATA, Local government laws, to protect the wellbeing of the “passengers” and depending on the size and weight of the animals, specific transport conditions must be met.
Guests on that day were a bunch of pigs raised in Brittany and their way to Brazilian horizons. In addition to the penning system, we carried in the forward belly (A) a portable ramp made of heavy aluminium and in the (D) belly a portable pack of 3 heavy duty electrical air blowers which could be plugged in the electrical system of the airplane.
145 pigs (2) showed up on time and were loaded in their respective pens. I was proud of myself, ready to go, and pretty soon it was Vr, gear up, and a ham sandwich “en route” to exotic Brazil.
(Loading of "cattle", or "pigs" or whatever can be loaded on a DC8, Here is an ATI plane)
Crossing the ocean with a heavy load could not be achieved non-stop and the charter briefing called for refuelling in the Canary Islands with a quick turnaround in Tenerife, a major airport, site of the worst aviation accident in history in 1977 when two B 747 jumbo-jets collided on the runway in heavy fog.
But on that end of the summer day, carrying pigs, with a fine crew in the cockpit, a good book on my side, what could go wrong?
Landing in Santa-Cruz was an easy thing, finding a parking spot was not that easy and after the airplane touched down, as usual, two of the engines were shut down which I believe impacted the air conditioning system.
Although the crew had kept the cabin temperature during the flight as low as possible, the inside temperature started going up and we called the handling agent on the radio to ensure that an air conditioning unit would be immediately available after engine shut down once we would be blocked-in!
But this was too much to ask for, as passenger flights had priority and air conditioning units were assigned to serve passenger flights! Who would care about a bunch of pigs?
To help in whatever way, I managed to open the back passenger door, and cranked the cargo door in front of position 2 opened a bit in the hope of creating a draft. Pulling out and plugging the pack of air blowers would take time, and I did not want to take a chance with the take-off slot as missing it would have had an impact on the rest of the operation. With two and half hours on the ground instead of one and a quarter, we were already late with schedule. By the time the cabin temperature came back to being acceptable, we were already over an hour out of Santa-Cruz.
Pigs do not sweat, I was told, and do not take stress very well. They are also prone to heart problems and the heat experienced during the transit in Sant-Cruz made me feel uneasy.
(Inside of a cargo plane. We would "construct" a kind of corral with several compartments and would then decide how many animals would be in which compartment based on the weight and balance constraints and the airplane structural limits)
Crossing the pond to Brazil in a modern age Jet airplane reminded me of the Mermoz era, when the guys of the French “Aeropostale” flew mail in a “Laté 300” seaplane. In fact, anytime I would fly anywhere in the world, I always had a thought for courageous pilots having flown the same trip long before the jet age… pilots from England, Italy, Germany, France, all of them with the same passion: flying.
Through radio communication using HF, we notified Tiger’s HQ in Los Angeles of our delay, and advised them to ensure that the relief crew would be waiting for us right by the airplane once landed in Rio-Galeo International. Fearing that handling conditions may be worse than those in Santa-Cruz, I did not want to take any chance this time and indeed, when we blocked-in, the fresh crew was just at the bottom of the crew stairs, ready to take over. Turn-around was quick, fuelling was done in 45 minutes and there was nothing to worry about! I relaxed a bit during the hour and half flight to Sao Paolo and could already see myself on the way back drinking a smart cocktail and congratulating myself for the success of the flight with my bunch of pigs.
It was early afternoon when we approached Sao Paulo and landed in Congonhas and when two of the engines were shut down during taxi a pestilential smell covered the standard “urine and faeces” one associated with animal transport.
While the crew donned the oxygen masks to prevent vomiting in the cockpit, I jumped over nine pen gates towards the end of the airplane to find what was the reason for such an aggressive horrible smell. The answer was there, under my very eyes, in fact there was twenty-three answers as twenty-three of the pigs had die in pen 10 and 11.
Heat, possible heart attack, stress, combined with being trampled post mortem by “next of kin”, the corpses were bloated, ugly, and already stinking.
Death must have taken place shortly after take-off from Santa-Cruz. As soon as the airplane blocked in, I opened the cargo door while the crew slid open the cockpit window to let fresh air circulate. Veterinarian authorities were at the bottom of the crew stairs and I explained to the Vet that we had lost a part of the cargo. No offload was possible for a couple of hours as the vet wanted to ascertain of the conditions of death of our French pigs.
I walked him all the way back to the last pens and that is when I realized that a few pigs had “exploded” and that a part of the cabin walls was covered in flesh debris of all kind! But bad luck came to an end as the Vet finally authorized the offload of the survivors which were transferred into waiting trucks, leaving me with my twenty-three corpses and a mandatory cleaning of the airplane after dismantlement of the pen system while the crew would be having a good rest in a top-class hotel downtown Sao Paulo!
(Just looking at the picture makes me feel the heat....! Poor pigs)
As previously mentioned, Tiger’s charter supervisors had the upper hand when a charter flight was on the ground and on that day, I used the “superpower” of my moneybag with a Tiger logo on the side. Hiring the entire team of the Airport Fire Brigade for a thousand dollars, we managed together to get rid of the corpses, dismantle the pen system, remove the debris, clean-up the walls, wash the floor, stack up the pallets and get the airplane ready for departure back to the US! ...A seven hours’ flight leg would be enough time to prepare a detailed report....
©2017 Sylvain Ubersfeld for Commercial Air Transport
(1) Chateau-Bougon, the airport serving Nantes, a major town in the west of France
(2) Britanny is famous for raising pigs for pork meat