Servicemembers establish smart method in assembling food aid packets
Photos and story by Raymond
T. Conway, Stars and Stripes
Capt. Boris Hall empties
Humanitarian Daily Rations into boxes. |
RAMSTEIN AB, Germany — For the past three weeks, between 50 and
60 soldiers, airmen and volunteers have been gathering daily to help feed the starving
people of Afghanistan.
Each day, members of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division and the
21st Theater Support Command, the Air Force’s 37th Airlift Wing from Ramstein and the
437th Airlift Wing from Charleston, S.C., and assorted military personnel from the
Kaiserslautern area have been loading approximately 70,000 individual food packets onto
aircraft to drop over Afghanistan.
One of the key pieces in the operation is the TRIAD — the
Tri-wall Aerial Delivery system. It is a huge cardboard carton that is constructed on the
spot and then filled with food packets, known as Humanitarian Daily Rations. The larger
containers are then loaded onto C-17s from Charleston Air Force Base and flown over
Afghanistan, where they are released.
In assembly-line style, the workers first construct the cartons and
line them up to be filled with the yellow-wrapped food rations. Each carton holds about
410 rations. The cartons are then moved onto a K-loader and transported to the flight line
to be loaded onto the C-17s.
Maj. Joey Hinson, from HQ Air North, cuts ties on boxes of food rations at Ramstein Air
Base. |
“We asked the troops to figure out the easiest way to move these
rations from Point A to Point B, and they came up with an excellent plan,” said
Senior Master Sgt. Cliff Harmon, command tactics loadmaster with Headquarters Air Mobility
Command. “They’ve streamlined the whole operation and made it happen.”
The carton is a heavy-duty cardboard container, nylon straps, a
static line and no parachute. As the container is rolled out of the aircraft, the static
line constricts and jerks the load, causing the box to burst open and empty the food
packets into the drop zone.
The cartons can be dropped from an altitude of more than 10,000 feet
with great accuracy. So far, more than 800,000 food rations have been dropped over
Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
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