Where It Came From
Freight Dogs Anonymous started the way these things usually start: as a private list passed between crewmembers on the same rotation. Somebody kept a notebook of which hotels actually let you sleep during the day. Somebody else kept a note of which stations would run a van out to the freight side instead of dropping you at the passenger terminal a mile away. Eventually the notebook became a website with a login on it, because the notes were only useful if the people adding to them were actually flying the routes.
The Anonymous in the name was deliberate and it was practical. Crews writing frankly about rest, fatigue and ground handling do not want their names attached to it, and the site never claimed to speak for an employer. It said so plainly on the front page in its earliest form: unofficial, crew-run, and open to crewmembers.
The Badge
The crest is a dog in aviator glasses on a blue field, ringed by the legend Freight Dogs Anonymous above and Order of the Sleepless Knights below, with the initials OOTSK tucked underneath. It is a squadron-patch joke about a genuinely miserable feature of the job — that the freight moves at night, so you are awake at night, more or less permanently, and the knighthood is the only compensation on offer.
Patch culture is real in this corner of aviation. Half the point of a crest is that it is recognisable to about four hundred people and meaningless to everyone else. That is the audience this site was ever written for.
House Rules
The rules were short and they have been kept.
- Write what is useful, not what is nice. A layover note that says a place was lovely helps nobody. A note that says the shuttle stops running at 2200 and the kitchen closes at 2130 changes what somebody packs.
- Nothing operational. No load figures, no schedules, no company procedure, no security detail. Ever.
- No naming and shaming individuals. Ground crew, hotel staff and handlers are doing a hard job at four in the morning too.
- Safety material stays generic and sourced. If it matters, it belongs in a briefing or a report, not in a forum post. See Safety Corner.
- Nothing here overrides your operator. Company manuals and the regulator win, always.
How the Notes Used to Arrive
The original site ran a member sign-in and a submission box in the sidebar — submit your shop, restaurant or hotel and we'll publish it — and entries were filed by category and by region, dated, and left open for other crews to add to. That model is why the guide reads the way it does: short, dated observations from somebody who had just been there, rather than an editorial voice.
The restored site keeps the structure and the writing standard but does not run accounts, logins or submission forms. What you are reading is the accumulated shape of those notes rather than a live database.
Reading This Site
Start with what you need — Hotels if you have a rest problem, Restaurants if you have a food problem — then check the regional page for wherever you are going: Asia, Europe, Middle East, Latin America, Down Under, USA.
If you are new to freight, the two pages worth reading before anything else are Jumpseat and Airport Safety. For the wider community there are long-running public crew forums — the freight boards at PPRuNe have been running for over twenty years and cover the same ground with a much larger crowd.