One of my indulgences lately is watching "Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel. The best combination is young planes and old pilots. The air freight business has a lot of the opposite. But, even the gray-hairs sometime **** up. My favorite episodes of Air Disasters are the ones with the plot "... flirting with a flight attendant, and forgot to set the flaps for take-off."

A knucklehead friend of mine got into the Navy pilot pipeline, but failed the eye test. He got moved to the backseat (Naval Flight Officer candidate) but quit during training. They were up in a thunder storm at night, and he said "**** this ****." They then made him an air intelligence officer. A lot of NFO's end up as commercial pilots, getting flight training on their own after getting out of the Navy. The skies are a safer place because my friend was not one of them.

I was a bank courier in college. One of my jobs was meeting small aircraft at airports. Banks would exchange paper checks using small aircraft at night. They'd get their money a few days faster than routing the checks through the Federal Reserve system. One plane I met only got a stack of checks about two inches high. But, a few days interest on those checks more than paid for the trip from Norfolk to Charlotte.

Check routing provided a lot of entry-level pilot jobs back in the day. The pilots got a lot of yoke and pedal time since there was usually just one pilot onboard, and night-flying honed their skills really fast. But, that whole industry was wiped out, literally overnight, by Check21, the electronic check routing system.

You need to interview companies who ship thousands of packages each day of the week. Ask them about their war stories and then and only then David will you begin to understand their frustrations........

one thing for sure; if you are shipping or having a valuable item shipped to you, you may want to consider having it professionally crated by a professional crating company. Otherwise it may arrive damaged and then what good is it?

Industry standard is small to medium boxes will be pitched up to 20 feet. This goes for all carriers. Pack accordingly.

Stuff going weird places is probably a damaged barcode. When these are identified they are fixed and put back into transit assuming other identifying information is still available. You really want to make sure something gets there, print a second label and put in inside the box. If everything is destroyed on the outside and the parcel ultimately ends up in a lost parcel facility, they will open the box and try to identify ownership by contents compared to claims put in.

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I thought this was a matter of course thing, putting the address inside the package .

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-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

You are assuming the average person isn't one step up from a moron.

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There's something to this. I pretty much only had to interact with other engineers at work. But, the real world is infested with idiots.

I worked in a state park in the summers in high school and college. I'm convinced that the human and raccoon IQ distribution curves overlap... a lot.

The raccoons kept pulling bags of garbage out of the dumpsters in the campgrounds. The dumpster company let up modify the dumpsters so that there was a two-lever process to open the dumpster door. The added lever had to be pulled to allow the main lever to work. We spent days installing the second levers on the dumpsters. The first day after we put the modified dumpsters in the campgrounds people would bring bags of trash up to the "contact station," saying they couldn't get the dumpster door open. By the second night, the raccoons figured it out.

Either that or mayhap folks are too trusting .

Of course, I go out and drive daily so I do understand your concern over morons.

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-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

The delivery problem of making many stops at different locations during a day, and doing it with the cheapest cost, is a math problem known as "The Traveling Salesman" equation.

So far no one has figured out how to solve it since it changes every few minutes.

You know Strava art? Maybe USPS is trying to do USPS art.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman