The High Risk Job of a Military Charter Loadmaster

I look back at my days of doing this and it would be considered brutal by many.  I would start working a flight on Monday morning with a few hours of reconfiguring the decks for military cargo, board the flight on Monday afternoon for the east coast, get there that night, wait in line to get your first load.  Quite a bit of hurry up and wait in this line of work.  Take care of all the particulars for the trip, get the flight ready to depart then leave LATE on Monday night which was actually early Tuesday morning.

Get to Germany on Tuesday afternoon, wait in line....Get your cross load done, all has to be done and out by 10pm or risk curfew.  Again, do all the particulars and get out on time!  Pretty often there was a back log of planes on the ramp in KWI, so you got held up in Ramstein for a spot to open up.  Flying over Baghdad every week was a bit wierd, but you got used to it.

Head down to the middle east, to get there weds morning, unload and load before the sun comes up and the temps hit 120 degrees .... good luck with that as you again have to ...wait in line.  Ku-WAIT was a saying in those parts of the world.  Take off Weds Morning and get back to Germany Late Weds afternoon.  Hey and guess what you get to do....wait in line some more .... then you actually have a couple hours to grab a shower in a public shower room.  Take off from there Late Wed evening and get back to the east coast Thurs afternoon.  This was the slowest part of the trip.  Again, you have to wait in line....then you have to do the ceremonies for the Angels on board.  This took quite some time because there was a ceremony for each casket and yo usometimes had multiple Angels.  Once that is complete, you do your offload.  Take off from there late Thursday night, get back on Friday Morning and reconfigure the deck back to a civilian format and you are done about 7am.

That was my work week and did you notice there was no mention of a hotel in there.  I slept in a seat or mat on the floor of the aircraft while in the air, in between flight segments and time zones, never really knowing what day or what time it was since we lived on "Zulu" time.  I ate airplane food for 3 meals a day, unless there was a few minutes and someone coule run to the base Burger King for me ar Ramstein, and I did this every week.

Toss in a maintenance problem or back log of aircraft in the middle east or a missed curfew and it easily rolled over into saturday.  The whole time I was doing everything, every thing necessary to make that aircraft airworthy and legal to fly, fueling included!

You have to be on your A game the whole time, every detail has to be seen, nothing can be missed or bad things happen.  You master the load, managing a bunch of 19 year olds who know very little about air cargo as a whole and watching everything they did, checking and double checking.    It was a great gig, but exhausting.  I do miss it though!

That was the glamorous live of a loadmaster for Northwest Airlines.  Check out the article below!


The High Risk Job of a Military Charter Loadmaster