I would have thought, with everyday items being mass-produced and therefore cheaper and lower quantity, airline baggage weights would decrease as people would buy e.g. books or clothing on holiday and throw them away when leaving.
JAL is trialling clothing hire at destination, so passengers can travel with lighter suitcases. You preselect your clothes, and they’re left at your hotel freshly washed and ironed. Not sure if it’s genuine or just a marketing idea for publicity / green credentials.
I always used to travel hand-luggage only to minimise wait times at the airport. Now, with children, we go with hold luggage, but it’s a lot more streamlined than I remember and we don’t lose too much time. Do more people travel with hold bags than previously? Or am I just the minority in travelling light?
I remember a holiday where the English people in the apartment next door had gone all the way to Greece with a suitcase of tinned food, mostly baked beans 🤮
A no-survivers crash on lift-off involving a small scheduled twin in the US was due to pax and luggage above the FAA standard weight.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
So far, I can’t recall that a single accident or even incident in airline traffic has been attributed to overweight passengers.
I referred to one in post 14 – in a reply to a comment by you, actually… Unfortunately the accident report is in Swedish only and the web version is a scan from paper so it is can not be easily run through a translator. But the main thing was that passengers being “overweight” caused the CG to be well outside the aft limit.
Standard practice in the USSR – only real hairy men with hairy balls fly these 
Right up to the line every time. Or they assume 20% of the cargo has been stolen, but this time it – exceptionally – wasn’t.
Peter wrote:
Airliners have more leeway because they mostly have huge runways and tons of power (especially twins, for the OEI case), so they know that regardless of what is actually loaded, provided they comply with company regs, they will get airborne, and won’t get fired which is what really matters.
Airliner pax weights have been under scrutiny for as far as I can think back and it has always been concluded by IATA and most airlines, that the averages used in the end ARE representative. Some airlines have adjusted them upwards in order to reflect their reality, others keep to the standard IATA tables. So far, I can’t recall that a single accident or even incident in airline traffic has been attributed to overweight passengers. It also has to be mentioned that airliners have huge reserves as all their take off and landing performance is based on one engine out at V1. Hence, in normal ops, they will take their MTOW out every time.
On the other hand there have been several which have blown their limits by simply disregarding them, such as the famous Concorde crash at Gonesse. The problem there however was fuel and tailwind which resulted in an overweight of 6 tons, which even for Concorde is not trivial. Loose 2 engines and bang.
Dan wrote:
As to judge the precision of the system, that would have been difficult if the PAX were not weighed in the first place, so no valid comparison data.
I recall somehow that Swissair ran statistics on the figures taken from the weight sensors and compared them with the on the loadsheet, and almost always came to the conclusion that the weight sensors recorded LESS weight than on the load sheet, even though the figures usually were within 2-3 tons. I also recall the CG sensor, which was used for trim fuel. I can look them up, I have the red books on the MD11. If you recall that Zebra DC8 operating out of BSL; that thing also had a CG and weight sensor (it was ex KLM) and they constantly complained about CG but never about weight. It turned out that once they were very right as a full hold of baggage was left behind by error which nearly caused massive control forces on take off… so I reckon those things were quite accurate.
Peter wrote:
Now I better find the famous Tupolev takeoff video
That was an IL76 freighter…. and I would really have liked to know what happened there.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Maybe @Dan can tell us a bit how accurate they really were
Good luck on testing my fading memory, we’re talking last century and a few more type ratings in between @Mooney_Driver
AFAIR we used them just as an informal indication since the system was installed, but not certified for operation. As to judge the precision of the system, that would have been difficult if the PAX were not weighed in the first place, so no valid comparison data.
Same for the CG indication on the ECAM, I sure don’t recall how this one worked either (by the way I gave away all my MD-11 manuals (made out of real paper) to some airplane fanatic a dozen or more years ago…), but I remember the display and the changing value as fuel was transferred to the horizontal stabiliser during climb (was it out of FL190 or close?).
The G-BAKH pilot had a reputation which preceeded him as they say in the James Bond films
Documentary footage, photgraphs and old movies of Croydon airport when it was the London Airport shows every passenger and their luggage being weighed before boarding.
But that’s when to fly you had to be rich.
Peter wrote:
This is a technical/safety issue. If you were flying a GA plane, doing some Wingly (or other “blind date” kind of job) and a couple of 150kg people turned up, would you do the politically correct thing and load them and crash and burn when you come off the far end of the runway
Cherokee 140 some 400 lbs / 200kg overweight. If you’ve ever flown a Cherokee 140 (they are a real ground-gripper with a poor climb rate) I’m surprised he even got off the ground. He was later sent to prison for this crash.
