I’ve been trying to keep up, watching mostly CNN, and up till this morning, they were focusing on the human misery; that’s why I got so frustrated and posted – like, Jesus, this is just unconscionable. I had in mind the military craft that Skylark mentioned. This morning, CNN had an aerial view up on their big touch screen and showed the problems – before: a seaport; after: no seaport, etc.
Another question: how are all those journalists, along with photographers and equipment, shelter, food, etc. getting in there, and are they bringing in any aid?
I’m sorry, but you’re talking nonsense. I study logistics. It is not nearly as easy as you seem to think. This kind of stuff was tried decades ago and abandoned because it didn’t really work. You have the enviable plasticity of thinking anything which looks or sounds easy to you actually is easy.
I saw a video on tv of a helicopter dropping food packages. A crew happened to be filming at the time. This was a relatively isolated location of a few hundred people.
The result was a total riot with people piling on top of bodies to get at the packages. Anyone who pulled out a package was threatened with bodily harm if it wasn’t shared.
The representative from the relief operations who was being interviewed said that this was precisely the mess they wanted to avoid and why they weren’t dropping packages from helicopters.
The Comfort also does not just sit in port fully maned just waiting to sail. When in port not getting ready to sail most of the medical staff will not be aboard. The engineroom will probably be cold iron. And until they know where they are going and for how long they will not know what or how many supplies they will have to carry. Also arangements will have to be made about providing medical help. Will it all be done on the ship or will medical teams be going out into the field?
I didn’t say the people were going to be crushed by a drop.
The people will fight over what is dropped as that is what happens when people need stuff badly to survive, and where there may be some people organized it’s not wide spread or simple.
It’s a mess but it’s a large scale natural disaster and people can only respond so fast no matter what you would like, and do only so much in the first few days. They certainly can’t miraculously get need materials everywhere instantly. I don’t see where people are withholding aid to see what happens in a few days.
If you look at the video I linked you’ll better understand why it’s doable. It’s an existing system applied to a different situation. All it requires is a little forethought.
**Just spoke to a Captain (one of them) in charge of relief. He says as normal, we are running the show because while everyone is dropping off stuff, no one stays to help hand it out. It’s great to fill the storehouse, but if no one is there to open the doors, then what good does it do?
The U.N. has been of little help and to top things off, the Coast Guard and Navy are scrambling to get the port open because gas is getting scarce.
We may start cargo drops with C130’s because not enough food and water is getting out there.
Basic needs items showing up on the black market The police force is reportedly weakened as a result of its own casualties (and that of family members) in the earthquake. The Haitian National Police have only 30-40% of officers reporting to duty.**
This kind of stuff was done in Iraq successfully. I posted a video of it. I’m not sure what you think is difficult.
Studying logistics is good. I’ve been in the logistics business for 26 years. My former company airlifted everything from whales to palm trees to 100,000 lb machines. If it fits in a plane we moved it.
The only modification needed from the video posted is to lower the flight to an altitude that will narrow the dispersion. You don’t want supplies falling on buildings that are unstable. I picked 100 ft because my old flying club would hold competitions with flour bombs at that altitude. At 100 mph you can come within feet of what you’re aiming at with little effort. If you look at the video you’ll see that the supplies are packed in slim blister packs and stacked on cardboard instead of wooden pallets. When launched they all exit the plane like a deck of cards. It would be like spraying a field for bugs. I don’t see this as wandering very far outside the box of adapting an established air-drop to meet a changing environment.
The rescue crew in my area waited all week for an aircraft. These are the folks who search for people in collapsed buildings. A c-17 was flown in from California and loaded up. They just canceled the trip and offloaded the plane. Reason, insufficient support on the ground for the team.
No, you clearly don’t understand, no matter what background you claim. These people aren’t sending the odd shipment, loaded up at leisure and sent to a nice ready landing strip. Thousands of tons of supplies are needed, and we don’t know exactly where or what is needed. Dropping things properly can be done with a lot of work and only a few kinds of items and precise control inputs; Haiti is nearly the ultimate anti-standard for those conditions. The Berlin Airlift was conducted under vastly better conditions with a vast air fleet and some of the most efficient servives running through three airports, and even then the thing only worked because the Russians were both incompetent and incapable of wholly cutting off the western sectors. This is not some kid’s game and they can’t get any useful result of dropping things randomly. And if we’re not dropping them randomly, it becomes a much more involved process, which is exactly what is going on.
Doesn’t the UK have a unit in their military force that can build an airstrip in like a day or something? I just don’t get why its taking so long. I know logistics are a big issue. But we know at the very least they need food and water. Load up cargo planes and start doing droops figure it out while your doing the drops. A c130 is big enough to drop pallets upon pallets of supplies and long with jeeps and a bunch of paratroopers. I just dont see why it is taking so long to do minimal stuff.
We probably wouldn’t have been able to invade Haiti without a seaport or airport in 2 or 3 days, either. And the reason military operations seem so efficient in comparison to relief efforts is that it’s a lot harder to prepare for relief efforts when you don’t even have the faintest idea of when or where or under what conditions you’ll be doing it. You can bet we’re gathering intel and writing plans for weeks or months before a military operation, but when you have to play it “by ear” without any kind of advance warning or planning, it’s going to be rough.
Wow, you know the US has people like this, they are called Seabees … they happen to have a bunch of them in Gulfport MS … sitting on their asses. They have all sorts of wonderful skills, like building instant airports, clearing rubble, instant buildings and bridges…heck, they have a unit at the submarine base here in Groton CT where as near as I can tell they sit on their asses, and occasionally emerge to practice playing with construction equipment … and they would probably adore a chance to go help build something.
We also have the US Army’s Corps of Engineers. who also supposedly can actually use construction equipment…
And oddly enough, all the military construction units seem to have this equipment that somehow packs into aircraft and can be dropped off where it is needed…:dubious:
No, you clearly don’t understand ANYTHING I’ve said. We knew on Tuesday that they would need food, water and basic medical supplies. Since you’ve only studied logistics let me walk you through it.
An airlift consists of a delivery goal. It can be a multi-point delivery of different products over an extended period of time. In this case, the recipients are 7 to 9 million people in various locations. Their requirements are not static. They need certain supplies immediately to stay alive followed by an ever increasing variety. If it doesn’t get to the intended parties in time then they die.
The first thing to be delivered is water, food, and basic medical supplies. To set this up an assessment is made for the following:
Airport access
Ramp space
offloading equipment
Aircraft support (tugs, towbars, tail stands)
personnel for offload/onload
delivery equipment
personnel for offload at end point
Fuel for delivery equipment
Verified land route
Normal charters would involve landing rights and Customs but that is not needed here. Just a quick check on internet shows there is only one airport capable of landing large aircraft. One. On top of that it doesn’t have taxiways so planes have to back-taxi after landing which slows both arrivals and departures.
There are 5 other small airports as follows:
MTCH Cap-Haitin___4886 ft___80 air miles from POP
MTJE Jérémie______3900 ft__123 air miles from POP
MTPX Port-de-Paix_3800 ft__100 air miles from POP
MTCA Les Cayes____3345 ft__100 air miles from POP
MTJA Jacmel_______3300 ft___30 air miles from POP
Of these airports Cap-Haitn has an unimproved extended threshold that could be used by C-17’s and C-130’s and it’s outside the earthquake zone. That’s what you have to work with along with a couple of East Coast “ports” that are being used by cruise ships (as we speak). That is all you have to work with as far as points of entry.
We knew from reconnaissance flights that the road infrastructure in the city was compromised but that was pretty much a given based on initial ground reports. That means the immediate goal of food, water, and medical supplies could not be met by conventional means. The logical solution is some form of air drop.
Air drops are limited to cargo drops from military aircraft or flights from commercial or military helicopters. The hourly rate of helicopters is a 3 figure number and delivers loads measured in the hundreds of lbs. There is also a distance limitation. There is no way we could cover much territory in the first week with helicopters and by using them they are pulled away from missions most suited to them which is the insertion of rescue personnel and the evacuation of the severely injured.
That leaves military aircraft designed specifically for air drops. The question then becomes delivery location. Are there places within the city for short-field drops? Not really. That eliminates drag-and-go pallet delivery. Are there contiguous stretches of space that would accommodate a small-pack drop? Yes. Do we have a system in place for small-pack delivery? Yes. Is a normal altitude drop going to work in these locations? Yes but it will scatter the supplies on unstable structures which will cause people to risk their lives retrieving them.
That leaves you with a low altitude run. Does it require a person-free zone to make? No. Would a temporary landing zone improve safety? Probably. Add a helicopter with marines to secure a temporary landing zone who can also radio the coordinates to an airborne airplane.
This takes all first response supplies out of the airport storage facility where it’s not getting delivered fast enough and puts it directly in the hands of those who need it. Instead of a couple of hundred lbs of supplies delivered by helicopter to a riot situation there is 40,000 lbs of supplies WITH EACH PASS of a cargo plane.
As it is now, we’re spending money to stockpile supplies for dead people.
You know what bud? If you’re such a smart, incredibly wise master of logistics, why don’t you go down and offer your services. Apparently, you’re so smart that the entire aid force en masse can’t match you, so go ahead and take over. I’m sure a brilliant man like you would have had no problems getting the planes they don’t have ready loaded instantly with the supplies they don’t have at hand, to people they don’t know and whsoe location they don’t know, in a day.
What you still utterly fail to comprehend is that simply dumping cartloads of crap near the tarmac does NOTHING. I don’t care what you claim, you quite blatantly have no experience running any kind of suplpy chain. You simply have no clue what you are talking about, instead focusing on the most trivial aspect of it.
Anybody with a charter background knows this stuff. It isn’t a function of me knowing something special. That’s the whole point of my thread. I’m just describing a system that’s already been developed and used (watch the video I linked to). It’s already been done. I’m suggesting nothing out of the ordinary. It’s asinine to suggest that they can deliver freight to an airfield but can’t delivery the same freight repacked for an air drop.
First off, I never suggested we dump cartloads of crap near the tarmac. I’ve suggested just the opposite. Second, I have 26 years in the business. I’ve worked for 3 major air freight companies. I’ve been a loadmaster, I’ve set up charters, I’ve scheduled routes as an analyst, I’ve worked in systems control. I’ve worked with supply chain warehouses for direct induction of customer freight. You have no idea about the real world or what it takes to move freight. I’ve dealt with everything from a Beech 18 to an Antonov 124.
This was screwed up from the word go because the task was not adequately defined. It’s obvious that the goal was to drop freight at the airport. We did a great job of that. However, It was a poorly defined goal looking for a warehouse to gather dust in. The person responsible for this is Gates. Sadly after 6 days the military is now using helicopters (versus cargo planes) for airdrops causing the exact problem Gates used for not using airdrops.
It doesn’t take days to pack an airplane. it takes hours to pack skids and 30 minutes to load a plane the size of a C-130 and that’s being generous.
Your entire argument revolves around the idea that the military can’t screw something up on a planning level. I’ve shown that that they have the equipment, training and procedures to do airdrops of food, water and medical supplies.