Hi all,

 

ok, not really a FS2020 question, but it does have a Caravan in it 🙂

I am trying to find out where a caravan would site at an airport. for cargo or passenger.

Would it go to parking General aviation, small gate, medium gate.

Ron

At EGCC, something small like a Cessna Caravan, Metroliner or some such making a commercial arrival, would either go to a remote stand (at EGCC, that's typically the stands numbering 65 up to 73 where the cargo area is close by on the other side of the fence at the head of those stands), or it might go to one of the lower 60 numbered remote stands (these are the ones near the control tower in front of the big Thomas Cook hangar and known as the Fairey Apron, since it is where Fairey Engineering used to make aeroplanes in WW2) and just park up pretty much in the middle of it, so it had room to crank its engine(s) and simply taxi off stand onto the taxiway for departure without requiring a pushback. So you'd be looking at something like this:

An interesting example of this was when there was something a bit 'iffy'. By that I mean something like a flight which had animals on board which would be used for testing (rare these days, since it is largely banned for cosmetics, but it still happens for some government testing although it is kept pretty hush-hush).

On occasions such as these, you would be pretty much asked to volunteer to work on such flights and you were within your rights to refuse to do so on moral grounds with no questions asked. Needless to say, security was tight on such flights because of the potential for protesters to object to such things. As such, the plane would invariably go to the stand much like the above picture, and quite often under cover of darkness. A police vehicle would escort the transport vehicle to the stand, and the animal crates would be offloaded straight onto the van and it would go straight out under police escort to the customs/cargo checking area with as little delay as possible. The reason they'd make such flights at night and use remote stands, was so no people in the viewing areas would be able to take any pictures.

A lot of the time you had to throw away your clothes after unloading such a flight, as you would be in contact with animal urine and we would also hose down the equipment after use as well. I didn't particularly like doing those operations, but I figured that if it had to be done, at least if I was involved, I could be as conscientious and caring as possible about the task. I should stress that this was rare, I personally only ever did two of these flights in the space of about four years.

I will also add that for normal animal transport, such as sending your pet somewhere, you need not be alarmed; everyone I've ever worked with in aviation has always been exceptionally kind to any animals, talking to them and making sure they are not left alone or in the cold and always have food and water or whatever else was necessary to make sure they were happy, so don't ever fret about sending a beloved pet animal for air transport, because I can assure you that they get spoiled rotten by everyone on the ramp and in the cargo areas, often being brought into the office so people can play with them or say hello.

Small passenger airliners such as the Dornier 328 either went to remote stand 66 or 67, or 50 and 51 which is near runway 23. Most of these flights required little in the way of fancy equipment since the aeroplane has built-in airstairs. Usually there would be only one baggage cart with maybe up to ten bags on it, a small tug to push it back (often a Mulag rather than a big tug), and that'd be about it, although quite often there would be a catering can (the sort that get pushed down the aisle) in the cargo hold ready for the return flight, and this would be transferred to the galley and the catering trolley which had been used on the previous flight would be transferred into the hold and strapped in securely. These are pretty heavy to lift up and so we'd often have the pilots helping us lift them in and out.

The unusual thing about the Dornier 328 is that it required an adapter on the headset to convert the single jack plug into a twin plug, since the 328 has a headset socket like that and is fairly unique in that for an airliner, although if we couldn't find the adapter plug (not unknown since we only had one), we'd just use hand signals with the crew since you are pretty much at eye level with them when doing a pushback.

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by Chock