PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Global Aviation Magazine : 60 Years of the Hercules
Old 18th Jun 2015, 15:22
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November4
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
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Metrification caused no end of problems. Simple figures became complicated - a 10,000 lbs net became a 4544kg net. The 3k net became the 1364kg net etc.

The Army was still using lbs. So a pallet of frieght was built using lbs, check weighed in lbs and then converted to Kgs before being loaded. We weren't meant to use the simple divide by 2.2 to get the kgs weight but multiply by 0.4545 as that was more accurate or something.

The other danger was that the VC10 and IIRC TriStar were still using lbs when Albert became metric. So transferring loads from aircraft types was a recipe for disater. There is the incident with Albert in Bahrain in GW1 where the load was taken off one type and put onto Albert, the load was thought to be in lbs, converted to Kgs......yes it was already in kgs but the original paperwork showed it to be in lbs.

Nothing to do with me I hasten to add....I was in Riyadh!
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