CF Kenworth PLS / Western Star HESV photo reference gallery

[Scott Bentley]

Originally Posted by rob love

I ran the heavy maintenance section for one contract in KAF and became familiar with the HESV, which by then had armour kits applied. I saw that one or two were listed as dump variant, but never saw them. I think it was just an attachment to the PLS. We had a couple of hanger queens which we managed to get back on the road, thanks to the excellent support given by the LCMMs.

IIRC, there are two variants of the HESV. The fixed 3 Way Dump and the PLS Dump, which as you mentioned is just a PLS attachment. Typically they deploy the PLS Dump as it is much more useful (Dump, Sea Cans and PLS Pallets etc) than the one trick pony 3 Way Dump. IIRC, the 3 Way Dump(s) in TFA were setup for SNIC (Sander and High-speed Plough) which although useless in KAF, saved NATO's bacon by opening the snowed in Jalalabad pass east of Kabul on my 2005 Roto. No one else in Kabul thought it was prudent to have a Snowplough in their TO&E except Canada

An interesting thing with the PLS is that its a 15.2 ton system which is fine in the case of the Kenworth, SHLVW and HESV, as they are all 16 ton trucks, whereas the regular HLVW PLS (which although is still equipped with the same 15.2 ton system) is limited to 10 tons due to the rear cross country suspension. Another little anomaly with the PLS systems were the pallets themselves. The SHLVW and HESV PLS were designed to move Sea Cans using a container handling unit and rear roller locking system, while the Kenworth, having a slightly longer wooden decked pallet with Sea Can locks on the corners, could carry an ISO 20 Sea Can right on the pallet.

There were also adaptor pallets available which would fit on the bottom of a Sea Can (requiring the use of a crane to install them) allowing a 10 ton HLVW without the rear roller locks like an HESV/SHLVW to carry a Sea Can using a before mentioned container handling system. I won't even get into my personal favourite, the Bridge Adaptor Pallet System for carrying and launching Medium Floating Bridge modules. The whole thing is rather boggling especially when the same truck was expected to move all of these things at one point or another during an exercise....

As a new Sapper in Resource Troop, I had the misfortune of discovering the hard way that the PLS pallet used with the HLVW was not backwards compatible (surprise) with the Kenworth. Apparently the jaw block locks on the HLVW PLS pallets were slightly shorter than the Kenworth, and on an unload cycle would bind causing the pallet to literally bend in the middle, and then release rather violently making a hell of a racket and likely damaging the pallet (or worst, emptied the contents off of your pallet for you). More than once I can remember having to grab a HET Troop guy with a Case W24 Loader and a chain to pull on the back of an HLVW pallet that a new guy to the Troop had inadvertently loaded on a Kenworth, IOT get the jaw block locks to release enough to allow an orderly non-destructive unload. Nevertheless, it was a mistake you only made once.

All this PLS talk really makes me miss the days of hauling bridging around in Res Troop before the war started and turned everything upside down....