Out of trim,
I've use d-plan before and it ain't exactly rocket science (also not the best load control system available either). Only took a couple of days to learn it.
When I was with Bmi when they changed to Shares/D-plan we did all the LHR Departures (90+/day) and all the MAN departures (about 15+/day at the time) with 2 people - sometimes in extreme situations we covered it with 1. So with a little juggling of the roster and flight allocation - yes I believe it would be possible with a couple of extra people a day to cover.
The Authority thing I was referring to was that if you are a handling agent Dispatcher and the Airlines own staff want to delay for whatever reason you don't really have the authority to over rule them, where as the airlines own dispatcher could.
The icident I referred to was back when we used the pictoral load plans and proper loadsheets (before these crappy acars things with half the important info missing - but thats another discussion i think). I added up what should have been in the hold based on the loadplan and compared it to the hold distribution on the loadsheet and there was roughly a 5000kgs differance from the loadsheet to the trim. When I questioned the load planner he said that it didn't matter about the trim as long as the cargo figure was correct !!!. I then said so you sent me an illegal loadsheet on purpose then thats when he got all arsey and swore and slammed the phone down.
It was partly as a result of this incident (and others too) that we started checking up more on the work clp was doing and hence why we have all these extra things to do now and changed to computerised trims and got ousrselves a Safety Officer that actually knows about clp/flight dispatch/loadsheets etc etc.
Things have got better now though, there are a damn sight less things that are wrong now (although with the acars loadsheets we can no longer check the hold distribution ??? ) . So it is improoving but still could be better. But as you said, the airlines will get what they pay for !!.
Happy New Year - maybe we'll chat on the phone sometime !!.
