Years ago, in Belize, a new army major took over at Rideau camp down south and having discovered that the Puma could be fitted with sixteen seats he protested very strongly that his unit were getting short changed and that the RAF weren't doing their job properly because our standard seat fit was twelve plus a winch. The OAT was often in the 90's and the humidity was often 95% so we really couldn't carry sixteen pax and any fuel to speak of (the HC1 only had an endurance of about 90 minutes from full tanks).
He decided to begin weighing every soldier before they were boarded and made a written record of passenger loads to present to OC RAF (and hence earned himself the nickname "bathroom scales"). The outcome was that the seat fit went down to ten because in fact we were being too generous in what we were already doing with the aircraft - the army had been very much under-estimating the weights of the average troop plus gear.
I had an "interesting" departure from that site, as a keen first tourist. We used to fly a group of soldiers plus a local policeman to a very small, disputed offshore island for "R and R" on most Fridays. The usual thing was to load the aircraft up with all the food and drink for their weekend in a very large aluminium "trunk" and then put a few buckets of ice in on top. Unknown to us, on this particular day they had loaded the ice far too soon before our take off and it had melted. Without emptying the melt water, they had kept on topping up the ice. By the time we lifted, the container was brimming and was a huge amount over the declared weight.
The "helipad" had been designed for a Westland Scout (far smaller & skidded u/c) and there was only about a foot of spare room fore and aft for the wheels of a Puma and none of it could be seen by the pilot once over it. It was raised by about five feet because the area was very boggy and criss-crossed with ditches hidden in long grass and was no place to try to put down a wheeled helicopter, even at the best of times.
I lifted to the hover and as soon as I had, I realised that this bird really didn't want to fly. I had no option to land back for fear of dropping a wheel off the edge of the pad, so I had to keep going....and going.. and going, scrabbling to find translational lift. The ammo dump was straight ahead; I remember staring at it for what seemed far too long. We did clear it, but only just and the Puma missed the trees beyond by a few feet. I think we all learned something from that. We found out afterwards that the soldiers had found great difficulty in loading the container onto the aircraft but didn't think to tell anyone that it was far heavier than normal.
Last edited by ShyTorque; 28th Aug 2019 at 17:43.