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Operation Flower Flight: How LAN Airlines Makes Valentine's Day Possible

Where: Santiago, Chile
February 17, 2012 at 10:14 AM | by | Comments (0)

Oh hey there cutie, did someone give you flowers for Valentine's Day?

If you're smiling at a bouquet of fresh blooms this week, take a moment to think about the journey they had to make before ending up in that crystal vase you bought at a garage sale. Unless you picked them from your backyard or purchased them from a local greenhouse, there's a huge chance each flower had a ticket on LAN Airlines, up from South America.

Indeed, just for the big rush before flower-heavy holidays (Valentine's, Mother's Day, Christmas and Thanksgiving), LAN's cargo airplanes ship in some 15 million bouquets, the majority of which are red roses, followed by carnations, pompons and chrysanthemum. Overall they transport around 30% of the entire world's flower market year-round.

Fun fact! During the week before V-day, "168 flights will carry flowers from Colombia and Ecuador—this means that every 2 hours, a LAN CARGO aircraft full of flowers is taking off."

All this we learned firsthand during a visit to LAN's maintenance base out by Chile's Santiago-Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport, only hours after LAN's big 767s and 777 freighters had completed the February 14th rush this year. Above, we caught a 767 in the hard maintenance hangar, where airplanes come for their regular physicals, going through the more involved processes to double-, triple-, quadruple-check that they're all good to continue plying the skies.

For example, this single 767 freighter will hang out here for around 15 days as it undergoes engine checks, winglet repairs, fuel tank tinkering and more; that's also 15 days it's not out transporting flowers, making millions of dollars and making your day, simply by the presence of a small bundle of red roses up from Colombia, through Miami (and LAN's massive cold storage facility), to your nearby airport, to your market, to your kitchen table.

We visited LAN's facilities as a guest of LAN, but all photos and opinions here are our own.

[Photo: Cynthia Drescher for Jaunted]

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