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It was February 2014, hours before the closing ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics. The city buzzed with anticipation, but inside a small operations room at the Olympic Organizing Committee, panic simmered. The star of the evening — the giant animatronic Sochi Bear, beloved mascot of the Games — had malfunctioned during final rehearsals. Its right eye had gone dark, the head servo locked in a frozen, unsettling tilt. The engineers whispered the truth: it couldn’t be fixed in time. There was only one solution. A spare, identical in every way, sat in a warehouse in St. Petersburg, over 2,000 kilometers away.
The opening ceremony was to take place in 6 hours, and a similar operation would normally take about 24-48 hours to plan and execute comfortably.
Standing at 26ft (8m) high, the selection of planes capable of carrying it cargo hold was severely limited, with the Olympics in full swing.
With the olympics about to start, airport slots were all booked up, and if you cannot land the plane at your destination, you cannot take-off at all.
It all started with a phone call from an embassy official asking for a private plane to carry highly precious and confidential cargo to Sochi. e immediately thought it was large piles of gold as we're accustomed to.
When they mentioned it was the Sochi Bear, we fell off our seats thinking it was a real bear. What ensued was like striking a bee hive. Our team immediately went onto a plane sourcing hunt, reaching out to all European operators who would not only have a plane big enough, but also in a "Take-Off Ready" status. However, we were very much well aware that finding the plane was going to be the easiest part.
One hour into the hunt, we made the fateful call, one last hail mary... a call that would trigger a series of events that needed to happen in perfect sequence.
A passenger that was supposed to land in Sochi just in time for the ceremony cancelled his trip from St. Petersburg cancelled at the last minute, not only right where we were supposed to take off from, but also exactly when we needed the place. However, we had to leave in the next 45 minutes in order to make the arrival slot in Sochi.
Ever heard of a plane missing its slot. Well we made it on time with literally 1 minute to spare. Had we missed the lost, the plane would've simply been denied landing, the plane would've needed to divert, in quite unhappy circumstances.
The bear arrived about 30 minutes to spare, and organizers had just enough time to prep. What a wonderful moment to see the bear perform on television knowing the major part we played in the role.
PEOPLE SAW THE BEAR
HOURS IS ALL IT TOOK TO SECURE THE PLANE
WILLING TO DO THE FLIGHT
PEOPLE INVOLVED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN