Air Transportation Technician
(MOS 967) Supervises the loading, unloading, balancing, tying down and stowing of cargo in aircraft and the operation of loading equipment. Supervises execution of manifests, airways bills, and other forms required in connection with the movement of air freight and passengers. May assist officer-in-charge of priorities, air freight terminal, or weights and balances in air transportation operation. Must know limitations of load capacity for all types of cargo aircraft. |
Flight
Taffic Clerk (MOS 2967) As
member of the crew of a
transport airplane, performs various duties in connection with handling
of passengers, loading and unloading of cargo, and maintenance of
records pertinent to flight.
May jettison cargo when so instructed. Must
be familiar with tie-down systems and proper placement of cargo in
cabin to insure safe loading and unloading.
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FLIGHT CLERKS OVER THE
HUMP AND THE BERLIN AIRLIFT A
perception has developed within the loadmaster community that the World
War II flight clerks assigned to Air Transport
Command flew as part of the crews on what is now
famous as the Hump Airlift from India into China. A paper written by a
loadmaster
who was a student at the US Air Force Senior NCO Academy
makes this assertion, basing it on what the author had been told by a
retired
USAF flight engineer who had flown in Air Transport Command in India
and captions of a couple of photographs he found in documents in the
school library. His paper assumes that those flight clerks peformed
what are now loadmaster duties. His assumptions, however are incorrect.
While it is true that there were flight clerks assigned to the
India/China Division of the Air Transport Command for flight
operations, it appears that they were assigned solely to flights
carrying passengers. Cargo loading was handled by ground teams
supervised by an air transportation technician who was assigned to
ground duty and was not a member of the flight crew. The ICD newspaper
the HUMP
EXPRESS is
available online. I have scrutinized each issue and have only found
two references to flight clerks, and both are in regard to passenger
flights. In fact, the picture referenced in the SNCO Academy paper is
of
a flight clerk conferring with representatives of Fleet Service, which
was established as part of Air Transport Command in early 1945 to
service airplanes being used on passenger flights with blankets, meals,
magazines, etc. There
are several articles that mention Hump crews and none include
a flight clerk. Crewmembers mentioned
are a pilot, copilot, aerial engineer or crew chief and radio operator.
Hump crews did not even include navigators because (1) they were over
land on established routes and (2) weight was critical so only the
minimum necessary crew
flew on cargo missions. A couple of articles refer to jettisoning
of cargo by crew chiefs, engineers and radio operators, with no mention
of flight clerks. There are several references to weight and balance
officers and to ground loading crew supervisors. One article about a
transport crew that crashed but was spared serious injury because their
load
had been
properly secured gives credit to the two members of the loading crew
responsible for securing it. Of the two articles that mention flight
clerks, the first relates how they passed out magazines provided by
Fleet
Service to passengers and the other refers to inflight announcements
made over the P/A System.
The Berlin Airlift was started as and remained a troop carrier operation from start to finish, with MATS C-54s (including Navy airplanes and personnel) supplementing troop carrier groups that had been brought to Germany from as far away as Japan on TDY status. The airlift started with C-47s but within the first couple of months became an all-C-54 operation. (At least as far as US paticipation is concerned. British and French crews continued flying C-47s, or Dakotas as they were known, along with a variety of other transports. At least one B-24 that had been converted to a transport was operated by Scottish Airways.) As during the Hump operation three years before, the C-47 and C-54 crews consisted of two pilots, an engineer or crew chief and a radio operator. A single C-74 operated on the airlift for six weeks during which it flew 24 round trips into Berlin. A single YC-97 was also assigned to the airlift during the final weeks, but only flew a few missions before suffering a nosegear problem. Since the C-74 featured an elevator and hoists, there may have been some kind of cargo handler assigned to the Berlin missions. At that time MATS included a number of flight traffic specialists as the World War II flight traffic clerks had been renamed, and it is possible that some of them were trained to operate cargo handling equipment on the C-74. On the other hand, their cargos consisted mostly of either coal or flour in bags and was either loaded by hand or by mechanized conveyors. |