Good afternoon Chief Pilot Claseman,
On Tuesday 4/4/17, EAC charter flight 925 went to Barrow from Fairbanks in a DC9. Here is how it went:
We took six pipes (each 1700 lbs and 40' long), six or seven galvanized poles (20' long and several hundred pounds each) and the rest of the aircraft space was filled with hand jive bundles of foam board (4x8 sheets in bundles - a two-man job to move each bundle around).
This load was trying, to put it mildly. I am no stranger to the "charter style" load or to the use of tools like the pipe stinger to get items out of the plane. In addition, I had a good co-pilot (Tollefson) and a good cargo agent (Kou Thao). We even had someone from SKW come up from the ground and help. We also had use of a loader/stinger combo for the piping. With all this preparation and skill, we still had a ground time of just over 4 hours. None of this time was spent waiting. It was all spent in the offload process, beginning with hand-carrying all of the bundles over the top of the pipes, and ending with triple picking the longer pipes to get them out far enough to swing clear. The foam alone took almost an hour, the 20' pipes another hour and the 40' pipes took the remaining 2 hours.
Adding to the situation was a temperature around zero, and wind out of the east at 20 knots. The metal may not feel this -18 degree bite of windchill, but those of us with our hands in the wind to signal the loader, or standing on the ground guiding the other end of those pipes sure felt it.
I will pity anyone who is sent on a similar charter any less prepared. Without the tools and personnel I had, we may have been forced to spend the night there.
Additionally, in planning future flights of this nature we should consider more closely ground time requirements. We were planned to continue on for two mail runs from SCC after this charter stop. There is no way that would have been possible after such a long offload. Weather is what ultimately stopped us from SCC runs that day.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to call or e-mail me.
Thanks,
J. G.
DC9 Captain
