Originally Posted by
michaelbinary
I was on a 737 flight to Malaga one xmas and there were only 24 passengers and we were asked to move about by the cabin crew. Not unusual.
Also there was a very famous 2003 CofG crash which killed everybody on take off, straight up and down. The plane was overweight and CoG was outside the aft envelope.
The NTSB investigator found that airlines were still using average passenger weights from 1936, but in 2003 people were on average much heavier.
This accident caused all the passenger weight tables to be updated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481
actually I can add an addendum to that. There is an AD on the B1900 due to the counterweight causing lockup in the pitch circuit. Due to lead melting around 700 degrees this wasn't found during the investigation. Our company had it happen, DoM looks at fdr trace, almost exactly the same but our guy plonked it on the runway. Inspection of fleet showed similar damage across all aircraft. See 2014-02-03 elevator bobweight