At the end of last summer, when the new school year started, I began my internship at KLM loadcontrol. This essential department of KLM’s operation is accommodated in the Operations Control Center of the KLM at Schiphol East. Together with the other trainees the internship started with a training of two weeks, to learn the principles of loadcontrolling and to work with the software. During this training it didn’t seem very hard to do the job.
The training was followed by a ‘training-on-the-job’ to teach me, within another period of two weeks, how to be able to work as independently as possible. I was taught how to prepare a flight (e.g. collecting the information and checking if it is correct), how to monitor the flights I was handling and how to finish the flight. In the beginning my trainer and I did everything together: I said what I thought I had to do, and if that was correct he let me do my work. As days went by my trainer let me work alone more and more. Of course I still had questions, as every flight is different and might have it’s own difficulties, but asking questions is very encouraged at the KLM. Because we work with aircraft stuffed with over a hundred passengers, we cannot afford to make any mistakes. We’ve learned never to do something if you aren’t sure if it’s the right thing to do.
Basically the work I do is planning how the baggage and cargo should be loaded in the aircraft, and send these instructions to the outstation. They will load the aircraft according to my instructions. I have to make sure the aircraft center of gravity falls within certain limits. And therefore it is important that they follow my instructions carefully.
Now I’m working alone for over three weeks, and I’m pretty satisfied on how it’s going, I even see things going better every day. In the beginning it was really hard when a couple of flights departed within 5 minutes of each other, but handling a situation like that on a daily basis taught me lot, and most of the times I don’t have any difficulties with this anymore. For so far I’m really enjoying this internship.
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