Inquiring minds may wonder just why a Boeing 737 freighter conversion owned and operated by Algerian airline Air Algérie was flying back and forth between Coventry, England and Amsterdam multiple times per day in December 1994, each outbound flight carrying 191 cows bound for Amsterdam, tended by two wranglers in the cargo section.
Minds who value their sanity can probably immediately guess the root cause: the disastrous decision of the United Kingdom’s “conservative” government to join the European Communities in 1973, followed by its catastrophic ratification under a “conservative” government of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 which transformed the “Communities” into the mephitic “European Union”. Anyway, before long, the dark pall of regulations, bureaucracy, “standards”, and mandates began to descend upon Britain, followed soon thereafter, among the myriad “unintended consequences”, by many abattoirs in the U.K. closing their doors, making it difficult for the country’s meat producers to bring their animals to market. They began to ship animals to slaughterhouses in continental Europe by road and rail, but this soon led to highly visible and disruptive protests by activists complaining the long transport times without food and water were inhumane. Henceforth, the phrase “when cows fly” became more than a metaphor in Britain, and aircraft chartered from African airlines began flying cattle across the Channel.
Here is more on Air Algérie Flight 702P.