Qantas Military flight

[airnrail]

There's an interesting Qantas flight in the air at the moment around the Maldives and heading for Al Minhad airbase (OMDM) in the UAE. Its callsign on FR24 is ASY1 which is an Australian Air Force callsign. The plane is a B747, VH-OJM, and it flew from Sydney to Darwin via Brisbane and Townsville before leaving Australia. All of those cities host military bases. Al Minhad is apparently used by many Western nations as a staging post for operations in places like Iraq. It is unusual these days to see Qantas doing military charters because the RAAF has its own fleet of A330 troop carriers/tankers as well as C17 heavy lifters.

[Oblivian]

Indeed someone alerted me to that last night.

SOmeone on YBBN spotters made the comment they had dropped some troops off at BNE to meet it, off for a 17 week deployment