Two giant pandas have landed in the United States, and they did it in style. A male named Ping Ping and a female called Fu Shuang flew out of Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport on a chartered FedEx Boeing 777 — promptly nicknamed the "FedEx Panda Express" — and became the most-tracked aircraft on FlightRadar24 as they passed Alaska mid-route. After a 16-hour flight crossing the international date line, the pair touched down in Atlanta, Georgia.
The timing was no accident. The transfer had been arranged earlier, but the departure was announced during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington — the latest chapter in China's long-running "panda diplomacy" programme, which loans out the animals to warm up foreign relationships. The tradition dates back to 1972, when China gifted a pair of pandas to Washington after Richard Nixon's historic visit.
The bears themselves flew in comfort, insofar as that's possible for a 16-hour haul. Steamed corn buns, bamboo shoots and carrots were stocked for the journey, and experienced keepers sent by the US side travelled along. Before leaving Chengdu, the pair got a proper send-off from the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
Zoo Atlanta is their home for the next decade, and the zoo isn't starting from scratch. It renovated its panda habitat, put together a dedicated caretaking team, and sorted a long-term supply of bamboo grown locally — Atlanta's climate, the zoo notes, is strikingly similar to Chengdu's. There's history here too: Atlanta hosted pandas on loan from 1999, and seven cubs were born at the zoo over the years, all since returned to Chengdu. The city has been without pandas since 2024, so this fills a real gap.
Don't plan a panda visit just yet, though. Both animals were born in 2020 and are around six years old — young adults by panda standards, given captive pandas often live to about 30. They're currently off-show in a biosecure area for a routine quarantine of roughly a month, so public viewings should begin in late October or early November.
Why should a traveller care? Zoo Atlanta was already one of the few places in the US where you could see giant pandas, and it just regained that status. For families road-tripping through the American South or anyone building an Atlanta city break, this adds a genuine headline attraction — and there's a decent story to tell the kids about corn buns at 30,000 feet and a plane the whole internet was watching.
