[Mr Ramsbotham]

WAS THAT AIRCRAFT TRANSPORTING GOLD, AND IF SO, HOW MUCH??????

Gold is very dense, and consequently very heavy. You probably couldn't transport enough gold on a commercial airliner to make it worthwhile for anybody concerned to hijack it.

[DB]

?

A pound of gold was around $20,000.

A commercial airliner can carry thousands of pounds of cargo easily. A couple of tons is pushing $100,000,000.

How many tens of millions of dollars makes it “worthwhile”?

[21twelve]

Yes it is very dense - but it is also worth a lot.

Lets say those 500 pounds of stuff labelled batteries was really gold. 500 pounds x 12 troy ounces/pound x $1,200/ounce = $7.2 million dollars.

It looks like a 777 can carry about 350 people (and their luggage and other cargo like “batteries”). About 240 people went missing. So that meant 100 empty seats.

Say 100 empty seats at 200 lbs/seat (person and luggage) gives us 20,000 pounds of extra capacity. At 12 ounces x $1,200 that is another $288 million.

Of course the plane itself is worth $350 million.

All that said - seems pretty far-fetched. But an interesting tale. And really, the entire thing (a 777 disappearing) is an interesting tale and seems pretty far-fetched. But there it is.

[762X51]

Gold is very dense, and consequently very heavy. You probably couldn't transport enough gold on a commercial airliner to make it worthwhile for anybody concerned to hijack it.

The math is fairly easy. The 777 can carry 112 tons, or 224,000 pounds or 3.5 million ounces. Assuming a gold price of $1300 per ounce that means this plane has the potential to carry $4,550,000,000 (4 and a half BILLION dollars worth of gold). Even deducting say half to account for passengers and luggage let's say it could only carry TWO billion in gold. It would then depend on your definition of "worthwhile". I can't think of a single aircraft where its cargo, if its cargo were gold at capacity limits, wouldn't be worth many, many times the value of the aircraft. Hell, 100 pounds of gold carried in a Super Cub would be worth more than $2 million!

[stockpirate]

The company website lists it load Maximum Revenue Payload:
112 tons, BTW that’s a lot of gold.