As the show jumpers take flight over immense jumps at the Spruce Meadows Masters in Calgary, Alberta, which begins on Wednesday, it may be some horses’ second time airborne. Some of the animals will have flown in on chartered cargo flights, sometimes across oceans, via a network little known outside of the rarefied world of sport horses: specialty horse airlines.
With equine-centric names like HorseFlight, EquiJet and Manestream, these airlines fly thousands of show jumpers and other horses to and from international competitions each year, in planes like the Boeing 747 and 777. They also facilitate the export of horses from one country to new homes abroad.
The horses don’t seem to mind.
“Amazingly enough, they kind of know that they are going somewhere,” said Bill Nichols, the owner and president of Alex Nichols Agency, which he said flew some 1,200 horses a year domestically and internationally. “They’re very compliant.”
To travel, horses, like humans, must have an official passport. The documents are typically issued by each breed’s governing body, such as the Koninklijk Warmbloed Paardenstamboek Nederland (or Royal Warmblood Studbook of the Netherlands), for example. They must be microchipped and have clean blood tests for a host of diseases; the testing requirements vary by country of origin and arrival.
The planes are equipped with equine flight attendants — grooms who specialize in live animal transport. Like their human counterparts, they spend the journey administering to their passengers’ needs, but in place of, say, Coke and pretzels from a bar cart, they offer such refreshments as fresh hay.
The animals are carefully monitored for the entire flight. Grooms who work for HorseFlight set 30-minute timers throughout the flight, for example, constantly checking the hay supply and the animals’ well-being. Alex Nichols Agency requires the groom to keep an in-flight log of every time a horse drinks water and how much.
Shipping from Europe to the United States or Canada costs $10,000 or more per flight. This can add up, as horses that compete internationally can fly more than a dozen times a year.
The journey begins at a handful of ports specializing in animal cargo. In New York City, for example, horses depart from the Ark at JFK, a privately owned animal depot at Kennedy Airport in Queens, encompassing 14 acres and 178,000 square feet.
For European horses, the journey often begins in Amsterdam, at Schiphol Airport’s so-named Animal Hotel. There, traveling creatures of all sorts, from sea turtles to red pandas — and, of course, horses — check in and head abroad.
For competition horses, which often must perform soon after their hooves meet the tarmac, special precautions are taken to combat jet lag. (Yes, horses can get it, just the way humans are thrown off their circadian rhythm.)
Tim Dutta, who founded the equine airline Dutta Corporation, keeps airborne horses’ feed schedules on the animals’ home time zone, even if they are heading to Hong Kong, where Dutta shipped the U.S. Equestrian Team’s horses for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Lights are kept on to keep the horses’ circadian rhythms constant on night flights, and the cabin is chilled to keep them fresh.
For show horses like the ones competing in Calgary, direct routes and point-to-point ground transportation are arranged, said Nicole Elsen, the operations manager for HorseFlight, which ships about 3,000 horses a year.
“We want them to be moving through like they have T.S.A. PreCheck and get them going as fast as they can,” she said.
When Nichols’ father, Alex, a horse flying pioneer, founded the family shipping company in 1962, horses were hand-walked up a ramp and into a plane where temporary stalls were built around them. There was little precedent for flying racehorses like Secretariat, or the equine actors he was hired to get from Hollywood to Spain for the 1966 spaghetti Western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” So his father had to come up with the machinery that makes horse transport possible himself, his son said.
Today, things are different — and safer, Nichols said. After the horses are unloaded from their trailers at the airport, they enter a secure shipping cube, typically outfitted with three stalls side by side. It is later hydraulically lifted into the plane.
Into the cubes step nervous fillies, stallions, mares, geldings and colts, sniffing the air scented with jet fuel. Whereas an anxious human flier might take melatonin or a sleep aide, sedating horses is avoided — it can slow digestion and precipitate colic, a dangerous digestive issue.
The best calming agent, shippers said, is the same thing that helps settle rambunctious children on a road trip: snacks. Each stall is mounted with a net full of hay at one end. As startling as it may be for a horse to step into the jet stall, as it is called, most of them appear to forget the novelty as soon as they see something like fresh alfalfa.
To that end, HorseFlight grooms fly with a steady supply of carrots and peppermints to keep the horses calm, Elsen said. “It is something to do to keep their mind occupied, rather than think about all the scary things that go on,” she said.
Shoulder to shoulder, the horses in their cube embark down a conveyor belt to a waiting lift. Next, a forklift on a crane slides under the box of horses, winching them up to the height of the plane’s belly and sliding the unit in horizontally. Then the attending grooms, carrying satchels containing the horses’ passports, and the airline staff work together to lash each container of horses down to the cargo hold floor with thick nylon webbing.
If a horse travels well in a horse trailer, they typically handle flying easily, Elsen of HorseFlight added. “If you have one that comes kind of unglued when he is away from home, we will have to make a plan,” she said. That can include practice runs in a trailer around the neighborhood in the weeks leading up to the flight.
Ashleigh Tate, who manages the 1,600 horse exports a year sent around the globe by EquiJet, sometimes accompanies the horses personally. Flying with horses, she said, is “very undramatic. They just settle down and fall asleep.”
Even when it comes to turbulence, she added: “It’s much like going down the Cross Bronx Expressway in a trailer — they kind of shift their weight and stick with it.”
The biggest moments in flight, Tate said, come during takeoff and landing. Some grooms will stand with the horses inside the shipping containers as the landing gear deploys, all the way until the wheels meet the runway, soothing the animals with words and gestures.
Sometimes, the horses themselves seek out the handler for comfort as the plane descends, nuzzling into their arms. “We tell them they are going to be OK and rub them on their foreheads,” Tate said. “They are all our babies when they are in our care.”
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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