[GH85Carrera]

I watched a interesting show last night on Mega Machines. It was about the Antonov AN 124-100 cargo plane. They had a set of molds for new windmill blades that needed to get to the client ASAP. The molds were made in Shanghai and the client was in Denver. They started in Russia, flew to Shanghai and loaded up the molds. They only had 6 feet of room left from the length of the molds in the aircraft. It was 390 tons at take off with a full load of fuel and the cargo. They flew non stop from Shanghai to Denver. It was cool to see a Russian crew in Shanghai talking to Air Traffic Control at the Shanghai airport and everyone was speaking English. The language of ATC. The Aircraft has a range of 9,000 miles. I wish they had hinted at the price tag of that cargo delivery. It had to be many millions of dollars.

Many long years ago when the Soviet Union was still around Oklahoma City had a big air show. We had the SR-71 fly in and be on display, the Stealth Bomber, and even the Antonov 124 with a Soviet crew. My boss at the time was on some of the committees in charge for the air show. He was the liaison with the crew. They were a nice group of guys that LOVED to eat. That fit right in with my old boss. He took them to a lot of great BBQ but their real love was Braum's ice cream. The entire crew was blow away with the fact they could each buy their own 1/2 gallon of ice cream, no rationing and they could pick from a zillions flavors. Evey night before they went back to the hotel they wanted to go to Braum's and each of the crewmen got a 1/2 gallon of ice cream.
When they were leaving they bought several large ice chests, and dry ice and loaded it up with all the ice cream they could afford. They certainly had no weight restrictions.

It was cool to take a tour of the 124. They had the front and back loading doors open and we got to walk through it.

I guess the Soviets built a handful of them. We of course have a lot of the C-5s and various other cargo aircraft. We can't haul stuff as big as their 124, but we can haul many time as much stuff with multiple airplanes.