flightaware.com/live/flight/POT707
I watched this massive thing come in yesterday while I was driving - it barely looks like it’s moving, it’s so huge…
I remember seeing it land at TUL a few years ago. I agree, that thing was SLOOOW coming in. My wife saw it and asked if it would even make it to the runway without stalling…
Anyone know what the purpose of its flights is? Seems like a strange city pair to me…
When in doubt, always go with the answer “Because they can!.” It is usually a pretty safe bet…
After exhaustive research, Ive come up with:
A. Something extremely large needed to be moved a large distance.
B. Numerous “something smalls” needed to be moved a large distance.
C. Lunch? ($100,000 hamburger?)
It’s a flight to carry an oversize load that is not possible to be carried by an American airline. Some of the items flown on these flights have included generators and GE90 engines.
See Search the Department of Transportation’s Docket Management (caution: not the swiftest of search engines!) Search to look for information on these flights. Use the advanced search and enter the name of the carrier in the organization field in the submitter section near the bottom of the form.
For this particular flight, I wasn’t able to find an exemption. This could have been a positioning flight. I noticed there was an exemption for a flight from FHU (near TUS; they could have been using TUS to clear customs, althought I don’t think a flight from Puerto Rico needs to clear customs) to HNL (actually, the military side of HNL (PHNL) which is HIK(PHIK)) in the past few days.
Cool, thanks for the info - so it’s basically sort of a commercial C-5 in a sense…
While it looks like an C-5, the AN-124 is a lot bigger. It’s gross takeoff weight can is around 1,000,000 pounds.
Dr. Evil} One MILLION, BAGILLION, SHABBADAABADOOBILLION POUNDSDr. Evil}