Just to mention a flight I remember from long ago as a First Officer on Vanguards...We arrived from somewhere at Madrid, Barajas to proceed onward to Heathrow. It was night and hot. The ground engineer was a bit hasty with refuelling and before asking, he loaded a more or less standard figure. The Captain, was pretty upset to discover that we were a Tonne overweight for take-off and insisted that he wanted some fuel taken off the aircraft.
Well as all will know here...Nobody will ever agree to do that without considerable discussion as the fuel taken off has to be re-processed and it has to be taken by a different tanker than the one that put it in etc. etc.
Captain was pretty angry at all this argument and was getting pretty heated.
I was P3 on this flight and after this had been going on for some time, I called the Tower for the latest surface temperature...It had dropped 2 degrees C since I had asked about 40 minute previously.
Problem gone...in the Vanguard, each degree C was worth 500 Kgs and we could now take-off. So away we went to London.
I have sometimes thought about this and visualised an ATC local controller peering at a dusty thermometer screwed to the window frame. I imagine him screwing up his eyes to focus on that scale of tiny degree marks on the scale and calling to me "Bealine 1207, the surface temperature is 28 degrees centigrade". Amazing and rather frightening to realise that this means we can get off the runway a whole Tonne heavier than we could 40 minutes previously!!!
