February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
That?s what happened to the members of the Shamrock Marching Band of John F. Kennedy High School in La Palma, Calif., who were scheduled to play in the Limerick International Band Recital competition last Saturday — the band nearly canceled their trip because they could not be guaranteed the shipment would arrive in time for them to march.
That would have meant also missing today?s St. Patrick?s Day celebrations on O?Connell Street in Dublin.
That is when FedEx stepped in and offered to ship the instruments to Limerick in time for the festival.
And what a shipment — the Shamrock band has more than 75 types of individual instruments, weighing in at 2,362 pounds.
The school?s director of music, Henri Soucy, said that several other carriers had committed to taking the band to Ireland in one piece but had then been unable to deliver.
Speaking by phone from Ireland, Soucy reported proudly that the band had won the Limerick band competition at the weekend and that the trip has been a success.
?We were saved from potential disaster by FedEx,? Soucy said. The high school?s band makes an overseas trip once every four years, he added.
Laughing, Soucy said that Californian kids were notoriously hard to impress, but that the welcome in Ireland was ?so nice, spectacular.?
According to FedEx representative Ed Coleman, a large FedEx container was provided to carry the band?s equipment. Here?s how all those sousaphones and saxophones made it in one piece.
The band instruments were loaded onto FedEx trucks at the high school on Wednesday, March 10, and taken to FedEx facilities at Los Angeles Airport. That evening the FedEx airplane flew the band instruments to the FedEx World Headquarters in Memphis, Tenn.
They were then loaded on board an MD-11 bound for Stanstead Airport outside London. From London, they flew directly to Dublin, on board an A300. They arrived in the Irish capital early Friday morning, March 12.
On Sunday, the band also took part in a parade starting on Limerick?s O?Connell Avenue and finishing at King John?s Castle on Nicholas Street.
FedEx Express has the world’s largest all-cargo air fleet. The planes have a total daily lift capacity of more than 26.5 million pounds. In a 24-hour period, the fleet travels nearly 500,000 miles while its couriers log 2.5 million miles a day the equivalent of 100 trips around the earth.
The John F. Kennedy High School in La Palma was the first high school in the country to adopt the name of the assassinated president.