Take that, Grinch! Sony is airlifting PlayStation 5 consoles across the world to save Christmas

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Actually, it is a plane — three of them so far, to be exact — all loaded to the gills with PlayStation 5s in a pre-Christmas ploy to deliver Sony’s sought-after console to more anxious British gamers than Tiny Tim can shake a stick at.

Determined like the Dickens not to let another holiday shopping season go by in the UK with nothing under the tree for PS5-starved players, Sony is reportedly coordinating a downright humanitarian-sounding effort to airlift the consoles, on dedicated jumbo-jet flights, into London’s Heathrow Airport. For fans who’ve been pining for a PS5 since the console’s November launch a year ago, it might just feel like a Christmas miracle.

British tabloid The Sun reports that a trio of Boeing 747s outfitted for 100-ton cargo duty have been “specially chartered” to make the emergency-averting airlifts, with all three identical flights swooping in throughout the past week to make sure UK retailers have a supply of PS5s on hand ahead of the shopping season. Close to 50 pallets of Sony’s slick but hard-to-obtain tech can reportedly be fitted inside a single plane.

These aren’t the little wooden pallets you’re probably used to seeing in warehouses, either: they’re “three-metre-wide pallets” designed for long-haul air freight. “Twelve articulated lorries [that’s trucks to us Americans] were needed to ferry the PS5s from the airport’s cargo hub to distribution centres around the UK,” The Sun’s report adds.

We aren’t even gonna attempt to do the math required to figure out how many PS5s it all adds up to in total, but Sony isn’t taking such extreme airlift measures just for sport. Demand for the PS5 has been off the charts from day one, with retail sightings almost unheard of even a year out from its release — not to mention online scarcity that still allows third parties to fetch more than $1,000 apiece for new PS5 consoles in the box…when, that is, even those are available.

Just in case you need a dose of retail reality before cashing out to claim a PS5, Sony’s official pricing seems downright reasonable compared to the moolah its hot console is going for on the open market. If you can nab a PS5 from a name-brand retailer via conventional means, the Blu-ray-equipped standard version goes for $499, while the disc-free Digital Edition rings in a cool C-note cheaper at $399. In pounds sterling (for our lucky British pals), that’s £449 and £359, respectively.