The commonsense procedures which used to hold sway have probably been swamped by the beancounters obsession with carbon use and other exotica designed to employ otherwise useless administrators.
WHO in their right mind is going to allow the bowser driver to depart the aircraft without some form of gross error check on how many litres should equal the kg uplift??
Dan-Air and others practised it many years ago, but todays digitally obsessed airlines are not so much worried about whether the crew have enough motion lotion aboard than sweating about the SG and its calorific value and their place in the great carbon trading con which is screwing us all in our domestic fuel bills!
But not any longer, the fuel chit comes aboard, the bowser has
'd off to the other side of the field and the SOP is now to fiddle with calculator changing litres BACK to KGs, using quoted SG figures to 3rd decimal place, then comparing before and after tank indications and then finding out too late that it's not quite right.
Can't see a pilot inventing that check, nor an engineer...................?
The question of discrepancy used to be answered by "oh it's 300kgs" til the respondent was challenged with "and what if we've only uplifted one tonne?". And that was from "qualified 737 engineers" who'd "used that figure on the 757"....................!
It's still a grey area in which a lot of airlines seem to have lost the plot.
