A Boeing 777-200LR operating under Mammoth Freighters conducted an extremely low, gear-up pass over Horseshoe Bay Resort Jet Center in Texas on June 24, 2026, raising immediate safety and regulatory concerns across the aviation community. The aircraft, formerly a Delta Air Lines passenger jet that entered service in 2009 and was mothballed in March 2020, holds the distinction of being the first 777-200LR ever converted to freighter configuration, with Mammoth's conversion receiving FAA certification in April 2026. The flight originated from Grissom Joint Air Reserve Base in Indiana — a facility that includes an aircraft paint facility — suggesting the jet had recently received the Qatar Airways livery visible in footage of the event, though it has not yet been formally delivered to the carrier. The stated destination was Fort Worth Alliance Airport, where Mammoth is headquartered, but the aircraft made an unscheduled detour south to Horseshoe Bay before continuing on.
The low pass itself represents one of the more alarming pieces of airmanship captured on video involving a wide-body transport-category aircraft in recent memory. ADS-B data initially recorded the aircraft at 950 feet MSL over the runway, but FlightRadar24 subsequently noted that ADS-B altitude is encoded in standard pressure altitude at 25-foot increments. When corrected for local altimeter setting, the adjusted altitude resolved to zero feet — meaning the aircraft was definitively below the 25-foot resolution threshold of the system and almost certainly within tens of feet of the runway surface, gear retracted. Compounding the risk, the flight crew initiated a right bank during the pass, sweeping the right wingtip through an arc that witnesses described as only feet from the ground. On a 777, with a wingspan of approximately 212 feet and wingtip-to-fuselage geometry that places the tip well below the centerline in any significant bank, even a few additional degrees of roll at that altitude would have placed the wingtip into the surface.
For professional pilots and aviation operators, the incident highlights several well-established regulatory and safety boundaries that appear to have been tested — if not crossed — regardless of whether the event was organized. FAR 91.119 prohibits flight over congested and non-congested areas below altitudes necessary to allow an emergency landing without undue hazard, and FAR 91.303 governs aerobatic flight with specific altitude and airspace restrictions. A gear-up low pass combined with a banked turn in a 300,000-plus-pound wide-body freighter pushes well beyond the operational envelope of any routine airshow demonstration and far outside normal ferry or repositioning flight parameters. The presence of what appears to be a helicopter accompanying the aircraft suggests some level of pre-coordination, potentially for aerial photography — a detail that could either mitigate or further complicate FAA scrutiny depending on what approvals, if any, were obtained in advance.
The broader regulatory context matters here. The FAA has in recent years increased scrutiny of low-level maneuvering flight following a string of loss-of-control accidents at airshows and during informal demonstration events. Mammoth Freighters, as a young but high-profile MRO and conversion operator with a significant program tied to the first-ever 777-200LR freighter conversion, faces reputational exposure at a sensitive commercial moment — with Qatar Airways apparently awaiting delivery and the broader market watching whether the 777-200LR freighter conversion program can establish itself as a credible alternative to purpose-built cargo variants. Any FAA enforcement action, certificate action against the flight crew, or operating certificate scrutiny directed at the operator would carry outsized consequences given where the company stands in its commercial development. For corporate and airline flight departments, the incident serves as a pointed reminder that transport-category aircraft carry no implicit permission for deviation from sterile, standard operations simply because a flight is a ferry, repositioning, or demonstration — and that ADS-B data, however imprecise, creates a near-permanent record that investigators can and will reconstruct.