Check out the March issue of MEN’S VOGUE for my rockin’ feature about Freight Dogs—buccaneering cargo pilots like Seth Brady, above, who fly the world in the dead of night, through hurricanes if necessary, to keep the global economy humming.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Freight dog” embodies everything a cargo pilot is certain that he is—an intrepid, independent, ferociously competent, downtrodden-but-proud-of-it pilot—but also what he is not: a fancy-pants flying passengers (or “self-loading freight” in dog patois) for United, American, Virgin, Lufthansa, Air France and the rest.

“We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” says Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain. “The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole different culture.”

When not piloting “clapped-out” 747s and DC-8s dating to the Nixon Administration, freight dogs cool their jets at hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cylcone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising.

It’s an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed “cantina” scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Café adjacent to Miami International Airport that generations of pilots have passed through in a sort of demented finishing school…

Their cargo comprises incomprehensible quantities of the mundane–160,000 pounds of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto CDs–but also a full-sized armored truck filled with four tons of Euro banknotes; a pair of experimental Lamborghini Countachs; a Sikorsky 76 for the Sultan of Brunei’s nephew; enough condoms to choke a specially chartered 747 to Rio for Carnival; an MD-11 filled to the gunwales with Victoria’s Secret lingerie; a mysterious ice-chest, insured for $2 million, enroute to the CDC in Atlanta that turned out to contain the first HIV drug cocktail.

Then there is the livestock: whales; thoroughbred racehorses; 13 male rhinos; 200 dairy cattle, 3 infant giraffes; 11 elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which got out and got behind the captain’s rudder pedals); ducklings (ditto); a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live crickets destined as feed for the world’s zoos.; a dog, the only cargo on a 747 freighter deadheading Chicago-Tokyo, who spent part of the flight playing Frisbee-catch in the plane’s cavernous hold with the pilot not flying (and was later photographed, in a meta-homage to freight dogdom, sitting at the captain’s station, paws on the control yoke, gazing wistfully into the sunset).

There’s lots more, including a tender scene where I crash a fully loaded DC-8-63 freighter onto Runway 9 at Miami International Airport—in the simulator, fortunately.

The story’s not online, so you’ll have to buy a damned copy for a change. Or better yet, subscribe.