Originally Posted by
TheSidestickPilot
Dear colleagues,
I was looking for a proper explanation of this around the forum, but I couldn’t find one. My question is related to the loadsheet and more specifically, why some loadsheets have multiple destination fields? I never really needed them in my career so far and I see no point in doing this, as you’ll need to calculate the weight and balance for the next leg anyway.
My second question is about the transit passenger and load fields. When would we need that? I guess, there is a good explanation and these fields are useful for certain types of operations (otherwise they wouldn’t be there), but we never had such loadsheet forms in my company and I couldn’t find any good explanation with examples anywhere.
Guys, if you can help me with this, I’ll really appreciate it.
Best Regards!
Hello Sidestick pilot,
Before I became an airline pilot I was as a despatcher, on the continent, in the period 1966-1980.
Operations of particularly longhaul flights has significantly changed since then.
Like Gatwick-Lisbon-Las Palmas-Bathurst-Freetown (1967) or UK-Holland-Athens-Karachi-Delhi-Hong Kong (70s). As you say it is not necessary for flight crew to know the exact breakdown of pax/bags/cargo and weight. But this info,
per destination, was necessary for handling staff at onward stations, fully broken down into Ad/Ch/Inf and B/C/M and division of loads in cabins as well as the holds. On departure an IATA-formatted loadmessage was sent to ALL onward stations, enabling them to prepare a fairly quick turnaround, whilst disregarding their inbound load and adding their checked-in numbers, again per destination, to the individual fields on the loadsheet. This facilitated load and fuel planning in advance. You can imagine that holds used to be loaded per destination, if at all possible. This avoids having to unload/load cargo and baggage to get to your airport's intended load.
I shall shortly try if I can lay my hands on a sample sheet.. In the meantime I hope this helps somewhat!!
Regards,
Four Reds Arie
ps I am out off the flying game for 17 years and a bit rusty