“This is the Flight Attendant speaking. Please stop moving about the cabin and stop your children from jumping up and down. We are trying to get a final weigh of the aircraft. And stop making a mad rush to the toilets, that’s not going to help. Trust us. Thank you.”
[sub]I know jumping up and down wouldn’t affect the average.[/sub]
Flight Attendant, “Mr. Smith? You’re the leader of this new Weight Watchers Vacation Tour group that bought out the plane? Well, I have some bad news…”
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
Passengers are by far the least dense thing we carry, and they’re skittish about getting on a scale in public, so the FAA agrees with the marketing department that just assuming, say, 200# each is close enough.
Fuel is ordered, metered, & gauged onboard in pounds or kilos, not gallons or liters.
[/QUOTE]
From my experiences as a customer, pax are extremely dense. Oh, you mean in terms of weight… 
There have been a handful of notable occasions where planes went down and passenger weight was a contributing factor. If you’re flying a small commuter or charter plane such as a Fokker or Beech, carrying a football team or soldiers with their packs can rapidly get you overweight if you’re calculating load as 200 pounds per person, but the actual weight is more like 350 per person. I don’t know offhand of any incidents caused by excess passenger weight in anything larger than a 737 or A320.
There have also been situations caused by ground crew making incorrect conversions of pounds vs kilos and not loading enough fuel. The Gimli Glider is probably the most famous example of this.
Agree with all your points.
Actual pax & carry-on weight really does matter on very small aircraft. When I flew Grand Canyon air tours in 9-passenger prop planes we did weigh the people individually. And distribute the big ones out between all the planes in the group rather than end up with one plane-load of Samoans and one plane-load of anorexics.
The airlines use different weight standards when transporting sports or military charters. Often all the carry-ons are weighed separately and we get a passenger list from the team / unit with estimated or actual individual weights.
I personally flew a flight in a 727 that damn near killed the crew and the St. Louis Rams. We’d done all the paperwork correctly but unbeknownst to us when the team got done loading the cargo holds with the preplanned weight of gear they noticed there was still empty space in the hold. So they decided to “save time” and put more stuff from their trucks in the empty space instead of leaving it in the trucks for the drive back to the home town.
We barely staggered off the end of the short runway and it’s a miracle we didn’t drag the gear through the lights at the far end. I know we flattened some corn with the jet blast. Had they managed to cram even another 1000lbs of gear in there we’d have been in real bad shape.
Even before Gimli there’s always a lot more attention paid to crossing the i’s & dotting the t’s when there are fuel gauge problems. One advantage to operating in the US domestic only is everything is always in our silly old-fashioned units with no opportunities for conversion errors on top of everything else.
There are they guys who play toss-the-log with the baggage and gear and there are people with titles like loadmasters. Who’s who?
“Loadmaster” is AFAIK a military term. It refers to a member of the aircraft crew who supervises the loading and is responsible for looking after the cargo en route.
Before loading he’d be checking for hazardous materials, stuff properly tied down to its pallets, etc. En route he’d be checking for leaking or smoldering cargo, etc. If the mission includes air-dropping the cargo he’d (or she’d) be involved in the planning, the rigging, and the actual jettison operation, as well as dealing with any malfunctions.
Airline, even cargo airlines, have no such positions. There’s nobody on the aircraft who’s concerned with cargo. Although arguably the flight attendants are that role, ensuring proper loading, unloading, & en route safety for the two-legged “cargo.”
There’s a crew of ground-based folks who transport baggage and cargo from the terminal to the aircraft and load it into the holds. There’s always somebody in charge of that crew with different companies using different names. We call that person the “crew chief” which is pretty clever. His/her workers are called the “load crew”, another clever name. One of the chief’s duties is to scan the tag on each item as it goes up the chute so we have an exact inventory of what went in where. This drives not only weight and balance, but also manages the lost / mis-loaded luggage problem.
Different folks in the terminal are responsible for sorting the freshly-checked luggage, the through flight luggage and interchange luggage and loading it into the correct carts or cargo containers to be hauled by the load crew to the aircraft. A different group manages the flow of non-luggage cargo. Mail is handled by a third group. Typically the cargo & mail teams are responsible to deliver their goods to planeside and turn it over to the load crew there.
LSLGuy, I’m a couple months getting back to the Dope but I wanted to thank you for your very insightful post. You are absolutely correct. When it works, it’s truly a marvel and one that I’m guilty of taking for granted.