Strangest Freight carried this is a forum thread on pprune Professional Pilot Rumour Network, kinda funny/interesting . . .
Hit the link…won’t let you view.
Maybe it works for me as a registered member??? Pprune is free to register, and an excellent source of aviation news and rumours.
The 6th topic thread is ‘Freight Dogs’, and then ‘Strangest Freight’ thread.
There are 14 pages of reponses, mostly from freighter pilots from all over the world, regarding some of the strangest freight they have ever carried.
I went ahead and registered…funny stuff
Never flown freighters…offloaded quite a few.
PIGS.
I used to fly pigs for the Mayo-clinic.
That thread has been going on since March of 2004!
Water skis and tow ropes for the PBRs!
A complete Cao Dai temple. Because someone from the embassy thought it looked “quaint” and wanted to ship it back to the Smithsonian! Didn’t matter that it was in use by the locals.
When I worked on a transplant team we often chartered flights. As it was a small charter company we usually had the same pilot. He told us he did a lot of dead body transporting for funeral directors. Once, at 3:00AM and totally dark, when he was the only pilot in a single-engine Piper, with a body on board, he hit some turbulence and the seatbelt from the right seat swung over and tapped him on the shoulder. Since it was only him and the dead guy on board he nearly jumped through the roof.
Flying large aircraft in Alaska in the 90s I hauled some strange freight: Sodium Cynde to a gold mine, pickup trucks, trash dumpsters, gasoline and diesel fuel in large bladder tanks and many other strange things.