Well, another interesting day on "the ramp".
Started off by hoping to meet Miss D in the South Terminal, but our paths didn't cross. I spent the first 50 minutes in the crew room drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Then I got the call "TMR please". Up to the allocator's window I went and was handed a job - Barcelona in / Porto out. Whoa! Up until now, I've only been a Team Leader on straight forward offloads, as there is a lot less responsibility - you're simply chocking, coning, powering-up a plane and getting all the bags to reclaim. In a plane turnaround, the Team Leader is responsible for ensuring the plane goes out again with all the right bags in it. Two of the Supervisors were going to join at the end - one on the headset to the pilot and one in the push-back tug, to push the plane off the stand onto the taxiway. Everything else was my responsibility.
It didn't start off well. One of the newbies - Suki - is, erm, a bit absent-minded and thus it was that the plane came on to the stand and rather than wait for the engines to spool down, off he merrily went putting the cones round the plane narrowly getting ingested into a CFM-56 engine. After that scare, the rest went fine - 118 bags off and 107 loaded. As Team Leader, I chucked them on the loading belt (ensuring correct destination, flight number and date on each tag) and then signed the "trim" detailing how many bags were in each of the 3 holds. This is then countersigned by the pilot. The 2 supervisors then arrived and the plane went off. Total turnaround time 33 minutes.
Back to the crew room - where I lambasted Suki for nearly becoming Suki mince. He's only young and just laughed. I wasn't impressed.
I was then sent off on another job and the rest of the night followed the usual pattern right up until the moment that Nigel, during an Edinburgh offload decided to headbutt an unyielding piece of metal in baggage reclaim. Claret everywhere. Not good. Being a good egg, he laughed it off and just said he wanted scars on his head like me.
Last offload was a biggie from Paphos and once we had finished I radioed in and was told to go back to base "for a chat". Oh gawd - I assumed it was to fill out accident forms an suchlike, but no, the chat was a very quiet "we need 3 people to stay on tonight, do you want it?" I obviously said yes and nominated Nigel, who was also up for it. "What about Suki - he's usually up for it?" I asked. "We sent him home earlier, after his incident. He may not be back." Ah...
The next plane in was from Palma Mallorca. At the time, there was only me and Nigel available, we were waiting for a 3rd person, but none had finished the jobs they were on. "No problem, Nige and me will do it." And so we did, just Nige and me. The plane stopped at stand 58 at 02.03 and at 02.27 the last of the 103 bags hit the reclaim belt. I radioed it in was was told "RTB (return to base) which we did. We arrived back at base at 02.32 and were told "We've put you down for 2 hours overtime each, thanks for your help now fu@k off home". Splendid, 2 hours overtime for just over an extra 1/2 hour's work. One of those every day would be nice...
