Cargo and Freight Crews
9 members · 7 posts · Cargo
Box haulers, feeder operators, and night freight singles. Schedules, pay, cold weather ops, and why nobody outside this group knows the job exists.
9 members · 7 posts · Cargo
Box haulers, feeder operators, and night freight singles. Schedules, pay, cold weather ops, and why nobody outside this group knows the job exists.
Mohamed Salih (pinned)
Freight, all of it. Widebody international down to a single pilot Caravan with cancelled checks in the back. The problems rhyme more than anyone expects: night, weather, and a schedule built around when the boxes need to be somewhere.
Mohamed Salih
Augmented crew seats are the most underused door into widebody flying in this industry. We run them on every long sector and the applications are thin. If you have turbine PIC and no heavy time, this is the step nobody tells you about because nobody is recruiting for it loudly.
Omar Haddadi
Ramp side, on a thing that keeps happening. If you are running late and ask us to leave a pallet, tell us which one and let us redo the numbers. Twice this year a crew has picked one themselves and the sheet no longer matched the airplane. Both times we caught it. I would rather not rely on that.
Omar Haddadi
Ramp lead, ten years, mostly night freight. The load plan is only as good as the last minute change nobody tells the ramp about. If you get a late add, call us before you sign it. Two minutes on the radio beats twenty minutes of moving pallets with the engines already running.
Mei-Lin Chao
Ops control side of freight. Our whole night runs on a sort deadline that does not move, which means every delay decision is a chain and everybody in the chain can see it. It is the most transparent job I have ever had and the most stressful for exactly the same reason.
Mohamed Salih
Cold weather thread, since it is that time. Contaminated runway numbers are not conservative, they are the numbers. I have watched two crews in twenty years argue with a braking action report and both of them were technically legal and both of them scared themselves badly.
Pete Halloran
Feeder side. I have flown a Caravan full of somebody's parcels into fields with one runway light out and a plow driver who waved at me. It is the least glamorous flying in America and it built more skill in me per hour than anything else I have done.