Contingency fuel
Ok Bealzebub, here's the deal. I run a plan for say a 6 hour sector, requesting max payload to land at MLW. The system gives me my payload, say 70,000 kgs, and tells me my trip fuel, something like 62,000 kgs, of which contains the expendibles, i.e burn fuel and taxi fuel. What is left in the tanks after landing is the alternate fuel + 30 min hold fuel at alt , also the 5% contingency fuel, which typically would be around 2,500 - 3,500 kgs. The Jepp system calculates that this conting fuel is burnt, but as stated earlier it is not burnt. So we will land 3,000 kgs overweight. Even though the burn fuel is approximate, by increasing the burn on paper by 3,000 kgs is a falsification of a document, and is morally devious which ever way you look at it. If it wasnt an issue, why wont the Capt sign the loadsheet when it shows the a/c to be landing 3,000 kgs over the MLW? And, by the way we are still at the planning stage here, so this is avoidable if we offload frt to equal the weight of the conting fuel. Finally, having dicussed this with many Capt's, I can assure you that it is often almost impossible to burn off the extra fuel en route, also very impracticable. Are you going to request a lower fl to burn more fuel ? are you going to put your gear down with 100 miles to run ?, I dont think so. I know for a fact that there have been many, many overweight landings because of these circumstances..................