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Old 27th Oct 2004, 14:06
  #360 (permalink)  
Ranger One
 
Join Date: Nov 1999
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I would echo the comments of a previous poster that this may well prove to be a 'watershed' accident. Especially if it's found to be entirely down to overloading.

Re. weighbridges - nice idea, although practical problems as other posters have pointed out. But look - wherever money is changing hands on the basis of weight, there are weighbridges. Every two-bit lash-up quarry and scrapyard has a weighbridge, dammit. Spot-checks for truckers at roadside weighbridges. Our industry needs to 'get with the program', as Americans say - we're the most weight-critical industry around!

A pre-departure taxi-on weighbridge is a great sanity check idea, but optional, IMHO... the way to go is 100%, certified, weighing of *everything* as it is loaded to the holds, by law - whether freight, pax, or combi ops. That would be a fitting legacy for this accident - if, as I say, it turns out to be a gross overload.

You don't guess and hope the weight of a bunch of lobsters and ice, or take the word of someone who has a vested interest in telling porkies, or trust they haven't mixed-up lb and kg, or counted the containers wrongly - you *weigh* the bloody things, and you do it *right*. And so do all your competitors, because fiddling or telling porkies is fraud at best, endangering the safety of an aircraft at worst - and you go to jail.

Or am I a crazy idealist?

R1
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