That won't be a problem tower........
Time: Some time in the late 70's
Place: Indianapolis International TCA (Terminal Control Area)
Players: A local controller and a ground controller, myself, a TWA cargo aircraft and it's captain and co-pilot
It was a cool clear spring night at the airport. There was no traffic, all the passenger aircraft were parked for the evening. Not much activity. There were only three of us in the tower that night.
In the years before FedX several companies tried to make some money hauling general cargo. TWA had a few freight routes and had some limited success hauling boxes. In those days the traffic levels were very light at night and TWA ran their cargo routes late on the evening shifts, it was much more efficient than trying to thread their way through the daytime passenger traffic.
One of the interesting facts about the Boeing 707 is the aircraft can be flown like a jet fighter. It can roll inverted, climb, dive, generally do anything a stunt aircraft can do. It takes a little longer, it is a little slower due to the weight to power ratio, but the maneuverability is still there. To sell the first Boeing 707's the test pilot flew serial number one of the B-707's past a review stand full of airline executives and rolled inverted. They got orders for 140 aircraft right after that stunt. It was an amazing piece of engineering in it's day.
There was an inbound TWA cargo flight, probably from Chicago. The late night procedure in those days was for the Chicago ARTCC to vector the flight to Indianapolis and transfer control to the airport approach control in the base building RADAR control room. Unfortunately the Chicago center for some unknown reason kept the TWA flight high in altitude, at 13,000 feet. Typically at a few miles out the flight would be about 3000 feet or so, as it was handed off from the RADAR room to the tower local controller. The TWA was handed off from Chicago to Indianapolis so high and so close to the airport that a normal approach would not be possible. When this sort of thing happens it is no big deal, the tower local controller who directs traffic typically on final out to about 6 miles would just vector the flight around with a wide turn to the other runway or allow the flight to bleed off altitude some other way. Then a normal landing is possible. Well, that didn't happen that night. When they called up to the tower (to hand off the flight to the tower operations) the RADAR approach controller downstairs advised the local controller: "there is a problem, the center brought this guy in to high and we can't get his altitude down". Looking back it is easy to see the captain had his next bit of entertainment planned ahead of time. The tower local controller looked out the window and noticed the red and green navigation lights waaaay up in the air and obviously way to high for an approach. Tower to TWA: "uh captain I see the center brought you in way to high. We can vector you around for the other runway if you like". TWA (captain) to tower: "Naaaaa, that won't be a problem". The local controller turned to the ground controller and said: "What does he mean that won't be a problem ?". At that exact time all the landing lights came on the aircraft. The 707 landing lights can light up the sky for miles on a clear night. Then the light string started to rotate from a horizontal line across the wings as the captain rolled the aircraft. Tower controller: "HOLY S**T, look at that!!!". The horizontal line of landing lights rotated to a straight vertical line as the pilot did a dive down from 13,000 feet to about 2000 feet dropping the aircraft with the wings vertical to come down in altitude. I believe the term is "roll over". The late night swan dive was right over trailer city with 350 trailers full of people that WERE sleeping. The captain greased the flight onto the runway, no problem. Ground controller: "uh captain......did you have to cage your gyros for that maneuver?". Captain in the TWA Cargo: "tower....I don't know what you are talking about."
There are a lot of nice things about cargo passengers. They very seldom try to fly the airplane (see: Air Force One - GO AROUND !!!). They don't complain. They are always tied down and won't fly around the cabin during unusual maneuvers. They won't spill their coffee. If things go very very wrong they don't have relatives that hire lawyers. Boxes make very good passengers.