By Candice Ludlow
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkno/local-wkno-805118.mp3
Memphis, TN –
Imagine a small city at the Memphis airport with 12,000 workers, 140 planes landing, parking, unloading and reloading 1.5 million packages into chrome containers that look a lot like those tear drop trailers of yesteryear.
Then pulling a train of containers with little steel cars that are called tugs. That's the FedEx Super Hub. It reminds me of Charlie and Chocolate Factory, with conveyer belts, people dressed in purple, and spiral slides.
"Normally we can land an aircraft here at the Memphis Hub every 44 seconds, so we'll land an aircraft 82 per hour."
That's John Dunavant. JD is in charge of the Memphis World Hub. We're standing on the one of the top floors of FedEx's air traffic control. The evening had what JD called a low ceiling, meaning a reduction of visibility due to overcast conditions.
"Tonight, we'll be a little bit reduced below that, just based on the ceilings are reduced and the separation of the inbound aircraft will be a little bit greater. But you can see, as we look to the south her, you'll see an inbound plane making the final approach there."
With Christmas fast approaching, FedEx usually predicts a peak day of moving packages through its Super Hub in Memphis. This year is different, says Jess Bunn, who is the director of FedEx Communications.
"In fact for the first year that I can remember we did not issue a forecast for peak just because of the uncertain economic conditions, very hard to tell." "It's been very volatile here. I'll talk about last night's sort. Our volume was 100,000 packages higher than we thought it was going to be. However, if you go back two previous nights, it was about 70,000 less than we thought it would be. The predictability and the traffic patterns are totally different than anything we've seen," Dunavant said.
The pilots are directed where to park the planes for offloading. This is where containers and tugs come in.
"Our largest aircraft, for example, is going to hold about 150,000 pounds of traffic coming inbound Memphis tonight. Each package weighs about 10 to 12 pounds apiece, but we don't just bulk load those packages on the aircraft. We put them inside containers and load those containers into the aircraft. And each of those containers are really configured differently, and they have a different shape to them, so it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle when you load an aircraft because we want to make sure we take advantage of every bit of space on the aircraft."
The packages - that are flown through the night skies - are then unloaded by 8,000 handlers, those are the folks who touch the incoming packages. I think of them as Santa's elves. They unload them onto conveyer belts, then they are distributed via a ramp that looks like baggage claim at any large airport, where they spill over and handlers make sure the labels are upright before they put them back on the conveyer belt. Then the packages are scanned and sorted by machine and sent to the appropriate area to be reloaded and sent back out to their destinations by plane or truck. During these turbulent economic times, FedEx is unable to predict its peak