Cargolux birdied!

TWO BIRDIES on the same course. It sounds like a golfing story, but it belongs to Cargolux and its partner service, Fastair of Kenya, and is probably unique in the annals of cargo freighters worldwide.
The airline's Boeing
727-200, northbound from Johannesburg, was taking off from Nairobi when a maribou stork was sucked into the jet stream, says Terence Hawthorne, Cargolux station manager in Johannesburg.
A big bird of that size causes havoc with the engine. So the aircraft came back to the airport and had to be put into the service area for repairs. A few days later it was taking off again on a delayed schedule when another bird, smaller this time, was sucked into the engine. Once again it went into down time.
Can you credit the same aircraft suffering an identical fate twice in this manner?
Cargolux, which moved into the South African scene four years ago, has its own fleet of aircraft, but decided to utilise Evergreen Airways' connection with Kenya's Fastair as a charter for its African services, which involve Nairobi, Harare and Johannesburg.
Flights, twice weekly, operate via Amsterdam to their Luxembourg base, and the airline is currently handling around 150 tons inward and 70 tons outward weekly.
There are some restrictions on exports, says Hawthorne, mainly because of the loads required northbound from Nairobi, where markets are blossoming and bookings are quite heavy.
We haven't concentrated much here on the perishable side, going rather for general cargo loads outwards. The bigger pieces of cargo are easily handled by the sideloading of the aircraft we use.
Hawthorne has been in Cargolux's Johannesburg office for the past year. He was previously in the London office of UTA and served as cargo manager there for the UTA/Air France combine.