MBeats - going back to your original question.
Ground damage and the challenges for ramp handling.
The challenge for Ramp Handling - Money & Time. Simple as that.
Why?
Airlines have driven the cost of ramp handling down significantly over the last 5-7 years.
This leads to some fairly definitive conditions:
GH companies now have to employ individuals on:
- the lowest pay structure thay can
- the tightest rostered hours as they can manage
- minimum length contracts to meet the ebb and flow of an airport's flight programme.
The results of this employment strategy:
- not getting the calibre of employee (very generalistic as I know of loads of very good, hard working and absolutely honest ramp workers)
- there is no longer any time for mentoring, tutoring or whateve the PC term is now; the guys and gals come in, do the work and go. There is very little down time for them to learn from the experienced guys around.
Low revenues also mean that the GH companies have reduced their GSE replacement programmes, in some cases to almost nil. This means that the GSE on the ramp is older, less reliable and puts the whole operation under pressure.
Low revenues also mean that the GH companies have had to look at reducuing training time (time = money) and most now deliver significantly less training that they did 7 years ago even though the requirements for driving and security have increased; that means that even less is spent on the functional training of the ramp worker.
Airports have got busier, stand pressure causes reduced space (eg. winglets added to B737's increases their width but stand spacing does not change. There are many airports that now operate stand clearances (even though they are legal) that would not have been considered a few years ago.
Time pressure.
Whereas I do not believe that the LCC model significantly increases risk of ground damage - there are usually fewer GSE items around the aircraft - time pressure has. This comes in the form of airline staff protecting their b*ms and their OTP bonuses and GH management fighting penalties for ground delays.
I STRONGLY dispute the opinion that most ramp workers would not report any ground damage due to the threat of being fired. I would concede that, at certain airports and within certain GH companies, their handling of ground damage leads a lot to be desired. The Alaskan Airlines incident when ground damage was not reported has been used by most of the companies as a good example of why you MUST report.
Just my view, not claiming that it is right!
GH