I like this! It stands out against some of the relentless all white fuselage and web address stuff.

TTP Hi mate….I’m afraid that my only experience with the C141 is seeing them overfly my house going into Mildenhall air base, and they are one of my favourite heavylifters. By what you say the rear door systems on both types seem very similar. The inner door on the IL76 also takes a long time to close and locks with a thud that you can feel through the floor even if you are at the front of the aircraft. I was told by an Aeroflot loadmaster that it can be opened in flight providing the main cabin was not pressurised at the time, the same for the C141 I suspect. One really good system on the IL76 was the electrically operated winch! This was a real boon for the onload of tricky cargo and it ran the entire length of the freight deck, I’m not sure if C141 has this. My own opinion on this incident is that the aircraft may be one of many badly maintained specimens that are flying these days. We used to see one through Stansted that was based in Sudan quite often and its state and appearance made your “toes curl”!

Sad news. I seem to remember that when we used to ramp the IL76s at STN that at the rear of the main deck situated just inside the ramp area was a huge swing down door with massive hydraulic locking pins which formed a bulkhead between the freight cabin and the rear loading ramp. Now the closure of that bulkhead door was an integral part of the ramp closure process, at least it was on the Aeroflot and Uzbek examples. I’m pretty sure that you can’t close one securely without the other so goodness knows what went wrong here.