Aerial Delivery combines knowledge with hard work

  • Published
  • By Kevin Chandler
  • 97th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
ALTUS AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  Throwing good pallets stacked with supplies out of a speeding jet may not be everyone's first choice of home delivery, but for the Aerial Delivery section it's business as usual. The 97th Logistics Readiness Squadron's Aerial Delivery section is an essential component of the Altus Air Force Base aircrew training mission. The 23 personnel assigned to Aerial Delivery work extremely hard to ensure pallets with cargo for flight training missions are always ready.

Tech. Sgt. Joseph Lankford, the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge of Aerial Delivery, speaks highly of his people. "They all work hard," he says, "I'm proud of what they do."

Aerial Delivery's primary mission is the facilitation of unilateral airdrop and air/land training. This means they work in conjunction with the training squadrons to ensure aircrews receive the training they need.

One of Aerial Delivery's duties is the building, reconstitution and maintaining of training pallets. Heavy loads, the most commonly used pallets, take more than an hour to reconstitute and almost eight hours to build.

While most bases use expensive rubber timber to build their pallets, Sergeant Lankford and his section use regular wood to keep costs down. Once the wood is no longer usable, the Aerial Delivery section donates it to base agencies and local residents.

According to Tech. Sgt. William Betty, NCOIC of the Aerial Operations Flight, the savings is about six hundred dollars per pallet.

"It requires a lot of technical expertise," Sergeant Lankford explained, "the different bases all talk to create the best training possible."

In addition to the building and maintaining of pallets, Aerial Delivery also packs the parachutes that help the pallet fall to the ground undamaged. A one hundred sixty foot parachute requires over seventy different ties inside. One mistake could render the parachute useless.

It is not surprising then to learn that Aerial Delivery is a duty section constantly on the move. To help support the increased number of students and training missions, they have built nine loads from scratch and reconstituted several more in just the last two months.

This is especially difficult because Aerial Delivery personnel face a constant deployment cycle. "Our manpower is constantly one-third down," says Sergeant Lankford. To help compensate for a lack of manpower, he tries to get his people as much training as possible. This consists of an Aerial Delivery Load Course and may soon include a flight to observe aircrew at work.

"I'm trying to get my riggers on a C-17 familiarization flight," Sergeant Lankford stated, "it would help them understand how it all works."