Air Force Staff Sgt. Dan Baird steadies a pallet onto his forklift at Ramstein Air Base. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Air Force Staff Sgt. Dan Baird steadies a pallet onto his forklift at Ramstein Air Base. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Airman Zach Fuchs, left, helps a fellow airmen place a pallet on a loader at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Airman Zach Fuchs helps load a pallet onto a forklift. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — With the push of the button, the pallet gently rolls down the track and through a sliding door.
The cargo disappears into a four-story warehouse, where a large crane automatically hoists the pallet and moves it to the right spot like the steady hand of a librarian sliding a book onto the top shelf.
The robotic rolling crane and warehouse, called the Mechanized Material Handling System, is a critical piece of machinery that helps the 723rd Air Mobility Squadron move thousands of pounds of cargo daily.
Without it, the squadron would have had a difficult time shipping the more than 200,000 tons of cargo, from food to ammunition. The automated system is the centerpiece to what the squadron does, but the 723rd commander, Col. Jeffrey Derrick, is quick to credit the unit’s roughly 750 people for making things go relatively smoothly.
“The people make it work,” Derrick said.
The squadron moves more cargo than any other Air Force squadron in Europe and the pace is only expected to quicken with the closure of Rhein-Main Air Base by the end of the year. The amount of cargo the unit has moved has doubled since 2001 and the additional number of passengers coming through the U.S. military’s main transportation hub in Europe will make things even busier.
Much of the cargo going through Ramstein heads to places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It never slows down here,” said Master Sgt. Brian McDaniel, the squadron’s noncommissioned officer in charge of special handling.
Airmen are already working long days, but they could get longer as the Air Force gradually shutters Rhein-Main.
The heavy workload will fall upon people such as Senior Airman Brian Tate, who keeps track of the hulking cargo planes that come in and out of Ramstein like rigs passing through a truck stop on Germany’s autobahn. But he is unfazed by the prospect of busier days ahead.
“I grew up on a farm,” said Tate, who is from Tuscaloosa, Ala. “This is cake.”
How well the squadron will be able to handle additional cargo and passengers depends largely on construction upgrades to the ramp and the passenger terminal. If those projects are delayed, it could be a greater challenge.
Right now, the base has enough room for 14 to 15 large cargo aircraft. But after construction is complete by the end of this year, there will be room for more than two dozen aircraft, such as C-5s and C-17s.
Maj. Leigh Method, the squadron’s aerial port flight commander, said the most difficult part of taking on more cargo and people is that they really won’t know how it will work until the day Rhein-Main closes later this year.
“There’s a lot of planning and testing,” Method said. “But you don’t know what’s going to happen until it happens.”
The robotic crane and warehouse that arrived on base last year is the U.S. military’s largest, fully automated cargo handling system and will help the squadron carry the load. The warehouse can store more than 450 pallets at a time and the crane can do the job in a fraction of the time of manually driven forklifts.
The question is whether airmen can take on the extra work.
Squadron members are optimistic.
“There isn’t a single person [with the squadron] who doesn’t understand the importance of the mission,” Method said.
