Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Something for the planespotters out there


Thanks to Lord Patel for pointing my nose towards a potentially very interesting, um, slip up in Belgium this weekend


A 747 freight carrier belonging to Kalitta Air, en route to Bahrain, slid off the runway at Brussels airport and broke its back on Sunday

Modern airliners with broken backs are thankfully a rare sight so this collection of pics of the unfortunate 747 is worth a gander

The most obvious, if somewhat unlikely cause, for such an unusual occurrence is that the load shifted on take-off

It would be interesting to know what the 76 ton load actually consisted of. The only details which have been reported are that 40 tons of it was ‘diplomatic mail’

40 tons of diplomatic mail

Kalitta Air is, of course, the charter air freight company which did such sterling work illegally shipping arms through the UK in a frantic race against time in 2006 - final destination the pre-cease fire open spaces of Lebanon

The amusing question for Kalitta Air today is one raised by Lord Patel…

‘How do you unload a broken backed immovable 747 in full view of the highway / train track?’

.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Make that 2006, not 2004.

Stef said...

/ edits post

Stef said...

/ whistles nonchalently

Stef said...

/ corrects spelling of nonchalantly

Sophia said...

Stef,

I thought that this news item might be of interest to you. It has all the ingredients, romance, airport security, Afghanistan, criminality, sex, etc...

Anonymous said...

Not only were they flying military goods, but they flew "enemy combatants" in "extraordinary renditions". Apologies for Orwellian language.

ziz said...

Hey got off the grass. Typos is my turf.

OK ?

Kno what I mean ?

Stef said...

asbolutely