On Sunday a FedEx Boeing 777F landed in Atlanta carrying nothing but two giant pandas, their bamboo and their keepers. It made headlines, but it was not unusual. Every year airlines and air forces move racehorses, zoo animals, livestock and even whales by air, in some of the most carefully planned flights anywhere in aviation.

Flying an animal is not like flying a parcel. It has to breathe, stay calm, stay at the right temperature and arrive fit. Here is how that works, through three of the most famous passengers ever to travel in a hold.

Horses Fly Business Class

Racehorses and show jumpers are among the world's most frequent flyers. For the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, 325 horses were flown into Japan, according to the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI). The first dressage load flew from Liège in Belgium on an Emirates SkyCargo Boeing 777F, via Dubai, and 36 horses landed at Haneda: the first full cargo load of horses the airport had ever handled.

The horses travel two to a pallet in an enclosed flying stable, which the FEI cheerfully compares to business class. Flying grooms and a vet travel with them, and the horses can snack on hay throughout the flight. Every one of them has a passport and goes through health checks and quarantine before boarding. And no, they do not need flat beds: horses can sleep standing up.

Pandas on the Panda Express

FedEx has turned panda moves into a brand. Its "FedEx Panda Express" flights carry the bears in custom crates they are trained to use beforehand, with keepers alongside. On the September 2026 Chengdu to Atlanta flight, the two pandas were the only cargo on the aircraft, and the flight lasted almost 16 hours nonstop.

A dedicated freighter lets the airline control everything: no other cargo, no extra stops, and a cabin environment set for the animals rather than for a load of electronics.

The Orca Who Flew Twice

The most extraordinary animal flights involve marine mammals, which cannot simply sit in a crate. Keiko, the orca who starred in the film Free Willy, was flown out of Mexico City in January 1996 on a Lockheed L-100 Hercules donated by UPS, bound for a new rehabilitation pool at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. He weighed about 3,500 kilograms at the time.

On 9 September 1998 he flew again, this time to Iceland, to be prepared for release into the wild. He travelled in a specially built tank about nine metres long, filled with enough seawater to cover him and cooled with ice, inside a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III. The landing at the short airfield on the island of Heimaey did not go perfectly: the C-17 suffered a landing gear failure that caused more than a million dollars of damage. Keiko was unharmed.

What Makes It Work

The rules for moving animals by air are set out by IATA's Live Animals Regulations, and every flight is planned around the species: crate or stall design, ventilation, temperature, feeding, and who travels with the animals. Crews fly smoothly, avoid unnecessary noise on the ground and keep loading times short.

Airlines have built entire businesses around this. Qatar Airways, Emirates, Lufthansa, KLM and others run dedicated live-animal services, and film crews have followed some memorable flights, from rescued lions on a Qatar Airways 777 to entire stables of show horses.

For aviation, the lesson is that the most precious cargo is not always a satellite or an engine. Sometimes it has four legs, or fins, and a keeper sitting beside it for the whole flight.

Sources: FEI press release (15 July 2021); FedEx press release (27 September 2026); Wikipedia (Keiko); U.S. Department of Defense image records.