RAF AT fleet, cx this out!

[juliet]

muppet show - dont mean any offence but i dont think you have a complete grasp on what is actually happening out there with regards to the service that is given by some of the movers.

let me start though by saying that there are of course some very good people within the trade. these tend to be the more senior types, ie. the w/o, f/sgt and to some degree the sgts. i tend to get a very good service from these people, they tend to show a lot of pride in their work. i do however hold them partly responsible for those that do cause problems which in my experience has been the more junior types. i dont think that there is always the guidance given that should be towards those that are relatively new to the job. i extend this to include the actions of the officers who i have, on the whole, found to be mostly pretty ineffective. this isnt always their fault, inexperience is often a major issue.

as for the actual problems that come up, well where to start. on my last basrah det we encountered some sort of issue with the movers on pretty much every trip. we werent always delayed and loads werent always damaged, though this was down to the fact that the loadies were sharp enough to pre-empt the problems or fix them as they came up. the problems were things like pallets being 1000kg out in weight (it hadnt been weighed and only the loadies experience was there to tell us that the pallet definately looked wrong), wheeled loads not being checked weighed to determine the axle weights and so the distribution of the load, movers unable to tell us whether a load was in pounds or kg, inability to build a stack correctly, and one of my favourites, removing the nose wheel chox so that it could be used to facilitate the loading of a pallet with a set of forks.

now you said that we, as aircrew, should take this up with the movers concerned and i agree with you. i have tried to do just this. on doing a walk around i noticed the movers loading a pallet on the back without using the stool. i pointed out that this didnt look quite right. i was told "thanks sir but can you let us do our job" fair enough i thought, they probably know better than i. i did however mention this to my loady when he returned from ops. he was shocked and mightily pissed off that they were blatantly ignoring the rules. i had tried to point out something to these movers which i thought to be wrong and was met with an aggresive attitude. this, or feigning indifference is often the result of pointing out something that you are not happy with. all of these incidents as well as some others were pointed out to samo. the response was that the movers are inexperienced in both working in an operational theatre and working with the herc. that did not sit well as much of an excuse but i understood his situation, the guy didnt have much to work with.

i am sorry but my overall impression of the movers is that they are often poor at their job and that the cases of poor judgement are not isolated. like i said earlier you do come across some great guys who are fantastic but they are unfortunately in the minority.