Aerial porters breaking airlift records

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Scott Campbell
  • 386th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) --  Aerial porters of the 386th Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron here are breaking records by moving more than 200,000 passengers and baggage since arriving in September.

They have moved more cargo and people than other units who have rotated in and out of this desert base.

“There is nothing these men and women can’t airlift,” said Master Sgt. John Hopple, an air terminal operations center duty officer. “(They’re) A great bunch of folks. Every day, they bring heroes home and send the right stuff ‘up north’ to defeat our enemies.”

The figures accounts for one-fifth of the 1 million passengers the wing has flown into or out of Iraq since October 2003, a milestone it reached late last month.

Additionally, the majority of cargo heading into or out of Iraq passes through here. So the Airmen on this rotation have already handled more than 9,000 tons of everything from ammunition to vehicles, mail and even popcorn.

“We once sent an entire pallet of popcorn under a very high priority downrange to the troops,” said Master Sgt. Scott Spackman, an aerial port cargo supervisor. “They don’t have it as nice as we do.

“So we chuckled, but I understand,” he said. “I was in the Army during Desert Storm and the smallest things can have the biggest impact.”

Despite increasing operations tempo and dealing with equipment availability issues, aerial port members have even eliminated a nearly 400-pallet backlog in the shipping yard.

“One-hundred fifty of the 397 (backlogged pallets) had paperwork problems that kept them from being ready for air shipment. And every day we were receiving 36 to 80 new pallets,” Sergeant Spackman said.

Eliminating the backlog required extensive coordination between the cargo yard, where accountability is maintained, and Airmen who load and unload aircraft on the flightline.

“Working every day, in addition to the day-to-day normal operations, we took it one pallet at a time. A lot of hard work and sweat got us to those 20 to 30 pallets [currently in the cargo yard],” Sergeant Spackman said.

The air terminal operations center controls the movements of both the yard and ramp, make sure the right people with the right equipment are in place to move the cargo for that particular mission and type of aircraft.

Averaging more than 2,000 aircraft missions a month, this task was further complicated by having 62 aerial port members from more than 18 different units.

“We are a mixed bag of active, Reserve, Guard and Marines interacting with the Army on a daily basis. We move cargo and passengers on four foreign-owned aircraft as well as every branch of the DOD. Everyone had slightly different ways of doing things,” Sergeant Hopple said.

Despite these varied ways, aerial porters are up to the challenge.

“We do more in one day here than most of us would in a week or a month back home,” said 1st Lt. Kenya Colon, the aerial port flight commander.

She said, “We truly embody the wing motto: Get Them In, Supply Them, Get Them Out: Boots on the Ground.”