737s at Manchester

[Chock 17,769]

Here's a few quick phone snaps from yesterday at Manchester...

This is the rear hold of a Corendon Boeing 737-800 which was on Terminal 1's Stand 26 at Manchester. This aeroplane went out extremely light (just 24 bags on it). In this pic you can see a couple of my colleagues up at the bulkhead securing a folding powered wheelchair. Things like that have to be checked with specific paperwork to ensure their electrics are not going to activate in the hold (sometimes we disconnect the batteries and tape over the terminals, sometimes they have a flight mode switch), they have to be placed on spreader boars (basically two wooden planks) to spread the load. They are then tied down with nylon rope and eyelets which secure to the floor of the hold, to stop them shifting around in flight, which is what those guys are doing. 

Here is the same aeroplane with the tug and towbar connected. I took this was while the wheelchair was being secured and to ensure that we'll be ready to go quickly, I am just on the way to the tug to get the headset from the tug cab so I can plug it into the access door you can see which is open on the aeroplane's side just above the nose gear door. This is also where the ground power plugs in. After that I'll be getting in the tug and monitoring the radio to see if the aeroplane will be having a standard pushback off 26, or something more unusual. The towbar has a set of wheels which are hydraulically raised when pushing, then when you disconnect it, you can pump the wheels down using the handle above the orange box which you can see mounted above the bar, this is so the bar can be towed on its own or wheeled around. Those towbars are quite heavy when you wheel them around. Behind the tug you can see the equipment storage bays under the passenger terminal where service agent DNATA stores some of its gear, behind that on the other side you can see some red Jet2 aircraft steps stored in the bay on that side. Although it doesn't look like it on this pic, the tar which is filling the gaps between the concrete sections of the ramp surface was actually melting in the heat. The red line on the nose gear door of the 737 is to indicate the traversing limit of the towbar when you are turning as you push back with a tug. right at the head of the towbar where it connects to the aeroplane, you can see a bare metal section which mounts the connecting lug. There are two fused bolts which go through this which are designed to break at a specific force to prevent the tug from putting too much stress on the towbar. These are called Shear Pins.

This is a closer pic of the tug which I had parked up after an earlier pushback of a Sun Express 737 MAX. It is in the Menzies equipment bay on Stand 4 which is outside the Menzies crew room. This is a Trepel Challenger 430, which is a medium-sized tug which can push aeroplanes up to 380 tons (i.e. something like a fully-loaded Boeing 777). The tug itself weighs 43 tons and can push with a force of up to 304 kN. You can just about see the hydraulic jacks under the cab which allow it to raise and lower the entire cab so you can get a better view if reversing although it does also have a camera in the cab which shows the rear view when you select reverse gear. The long black strip above the front of the cab is a rubber pressure sensor which is there to prevent accidentally raising the cab up too far and hitting the underside of an aeroplane if you are connected to something which projects over the cab although you can see there isn't much danger of that with the long 737 towbar. The steering system on this tug has several modes, it can have just the front wheels steer, or it can have all the wheels steer, or it can have the front and the rear wheels both turn the same way so that it can 'crab' sideways. We normally only use the mode where it steers the front and the rear wheels both at the same time so it can turn quite tight in spite of it being quite big and heavy. This particular tug is affectionately known as 'Big Bertha'. If you've ever watched the movie 'Aliens', you might have noticed that the 'armored personnel carrier' which the Marines have to drive about in, is in fact made from a tug not too dissimilar to one of these things.

This is a Sun Express Boeing 737 MAX, which in this pic, I have just pushed off the same stand as that Corendon 737-800 in the other pics. To do a standard push off 26, you push the aeroplane back and around to the right so it will be facing out of the cul-de-sac (this can be a little bit tight), then you pull it forward to Tug Release Point 26, which you can see the nosewheel is stopped on. Once you've done that, you wait for the headset guy (in this case my colleague Dave) to pump down the transit wheels on the towbar, then he'll disconnect that, then I back the tug up away from the aeroplane, then turn it right and park it in front of the port wing so the flight deck crew can see it, then you get out and take the towbar and connect that to the back of the tug, which in this pic we have already done. Then you wait for the headset person to finish supervising the engine start and when he has done that and removed the steering bypass pin (which you can see the remove before flight streamer on in the nose gear) and unplugged the headset, he will remove the chock placed on the nosewheel and hand it to me, so I can put it on the tug (it's done like this so that there are two people observing removing the pin, disconnecting everything etc), then we drive off with the headset person walking out to the wingtip to show the crew the removed pin for the wave off. On this pic, because the MAX engines take quite a long time to start up, I had time to take this picture. The starboard (number 2) engine is running and up to speed, the  port (number 1) engine is still motoring before cranking up to full speed in order to prevent the spindle on the engine from heating up too quickly and potentially warping.

Here I am looking handsome as ever in front of the Corendon 737, about to get in the tug (note that this last pic is reversed because I flipped the camera mode to be able to take this selfie, so nope, the jet bridge is not on the wrong side!).

 

 

 

Edited June 8, 2022 by Chock

[JRMurray 214]

Thanks, Chock. Really interesting.

This past Sunday, I flew on Air Canada from St. John's, NL (CYYT) to Toronto (CYYZ) on an Airbus A220, and then on a 787-8 from CYYZ to my hometown, Vancouver (CYVR). Our connection in Toronto was delayed three hours because apparently there is a shortage of ground crews to load the planes, and once a crew was located, they had difficulty loading the plane with a cargo pod (or whatever they're called). Also, the pilot told us passengers that there was also a delay because the headset wasn't working (again, apparently).

So ... a question: delays at major Canadian airports such as CYVR and CYYZ have been in the news lately, probably due to the difficulty in rehiring ground crew, who may have left the field during COVID to do other things. Are you seeing that in England as well?

[mwilk 1,107]

I spent the better part of 36 years in cargo bins for a US Airline. The worst thing to ever happen was when they started putting wheels on luggage. Up to that point people had to carry their luggage so they were a little more conservative with how much they put in their bags.. Once they didn't have to carry their luggage anymore all bets were off.

[Chock 17,769]

18 hours ago, JRMurray said:

Thanks, Chock. Really interesting.

This past Sunday, I flew on Air Canada from St. John's, NL (CYYT) to Toronto (CYYZ) on an Airbus A220, and then on a 787-8 from CYYZ to my hometown, Vancouver (CYVR). Our connection in Toronto was delayed three hours because apparently there is a shortage of ground crews to load the planes, and once a crew was located, they had difficulty loading the plane with a cargo pod (or whatever they're called). Also, the pilot told us passengers that there was also a delay because the headset wasn't working (again, apparently).

So ... a question: delays at major Canadian airports such as CYVR and CYYZ have been in the news lately, probably due to the difficulty in rehiring ground crew, who may have left the field during COVID to do other things. Are you seeing that in England as well?

Short answer is, yes. As you note, lots of people were laid off during the Covid pandemic and took other jobs, then when asked if they wanted to return to airport jobs, simply did not want to because their wages and conditions are better in the other job. Anyone who has done a job at the airport will probably tell you that it's a job most people will either love or hate, and as such it either gets in their system and they'll happily do it, or they just won't like it at all and leave pretty quickly, but for those who got laid off and then were offered the chance to come back, I suspect other jobs which are less hassle and better money have got them past that addiction to their former airport job.

So most companies at the airports in the UK are finding that it's been pretty hard to recruit staff, and even when they've been able to do so, it then takes time to train people on all the things they need to be able to do the job. Plus as with all jobs, there is a big difference between someone who's been doing it a long time and someone who is new to it - experience and good sense counts for a lot in the job when it comes to getting it done quickly and efficiently, even on the seemingly easy stuff. This is why most people in the know estimated that it would be 2024 before the furloughs and lay-offs from the pandemic would cease to have an impact on airline operations.

For example, let's say you are at the bottom of the belt loader, taking bags off it and loading them onto trailers so the trailers can be driven in and dumped onto the carousel for the passengers to reclaim their bags. Pretty easy and straightforward task right? In principle that's true, but in practice some people are far better at it than others; the bags are very heavy these days and although putting the first ones on the trailer is easy enough, you have to be able to stack them five high and five across, in two rows, so you end up with them all staying on the trailer as it drives around, so getting those last few bags up at the top of the stack on the trailers is a pretty good workout and has to be done in a sensible way (and quickly). It's worth noting that in the UK, you can't even do this task until you have done a Triple A check and the relevant exams so you know about bombs, weapons and such and their various means of concealment; these days you are also security screened by M.I.5 as well in addition to having the regular DBS five year check and all the stuff related to that. All of that malarkey puts some people off applying for the job too, because it takes weeks to get cleared for your security pass.

Decent rampies who are used to the job can get fifty bags on a curtain trailer, but some people are just awful at stacking and will end up with a full trailer with far fewer than fifty bags on it. Badly-stacked bags are prone to falling off the trailer as it drives in because they weren't stacked well and some people are terrible drivers as well, which doesn't help those bags stay on the trailers. The same is true when it comes to loading an aeroplane too. Some people are better at that than others and will easily fit fifty or more bags in the front hold of a 737 and barely use half the length of the hold, whereas less capable people will stack them badly and be up near the cargo door struggling to fit the last few bags in as a result of not having stacked things properly. A decent crew will perhaps only need four trailers to offload 180 bags from an A320, but a less capable bunch of rampies might need six trailers and will take longer to do it. They may also find they are short of equipment. Loading and unloading an airliner efficiently is therefore a bit like that Tetris game against the clock, but with pieces which weigh 40+ kgs each; some people are good at this, others not so much. Either way, you end up with one of two things; really good muscles, or a bad back, sometimes both.

And that's before we get into the more complex ramp stuff such as doing and revising load plans for correct weight distribution, dealing with unusual issues quickly, operating all kinds of vehicles, and so on. Some people are just better at this than others, and that's often down to having a lot of experience of it as well. Thus it's fairly inevitable that new staff might not be great at that kind of thing for at least a while, and even if they are, it does take time to train people on all of the tasks.

With regard to the headset not working, that's really not that uncommon; sometimes it can be the aeroplane's socket which is problematic, sometimes the headset itself will be busted. Either way, that should not really cause a delay because you would simply use hand signals instead and just get on with it. You actually have to use hand signals in electrical storm conditions to remove the risk of electrocution from a lightning strike hitting the aeroplane and going down the headset wire, so everyone who does headset training has to know all the hand signals to be able to do a pushback without a headset and in fact they would not even get signed off on doing the procedure unless they had demonstrated being able to do a pushback using hand signals. Also, because the headset could potentially go unserviceable during a pushback, you would need to be able to revert to using signals. So a busted headset is not a problem and should not cause a delay; we actually use hand signals for a pushbacks quite regularly, sometimes even when we have a working headset, just to keep everyone on their toes!

 

 

[JRMurray 214]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

With regard to the headset not working, that's really not that uncommon

I was wondering about that. I know that hand signals are used, so I thought it strange when the pilot announced that there were problems with the headset, causing a further delay. Why not just use hand signals, then?

Anyway, thanks for the detailed response. Incredibly interesting, valuable info.