Aircraft Trim

[TSR2]

I recently returned from Faro on an Airbus A320. Prior to push-back the Captain requested the Cabin Crew to 'move 5 passengers from the rear cabin to the centre cabin for the purpose of take-off trim'

Is the A320 really that sensitive to distribution of weight within the aircraft?

The headcount was 139+5. The runway in use was 28 with little wind and a temperature of approx. 82F in light rain.

[Final 3 Greens]

TSR2

Caveat - I am not a commercial pilot, but I am a pilot and used to discuss such things with my next door neighbour who was an A320 pilot.

An A320 is sufficiently long for the effect of moving 5 pax (5 x 75kg = 375kg) to have a noticeable effect.

Now I am speculating here (I refer to the above caveat) but if the luggage was in the rear hold (for optimum trim in the cruise) and the front hold was not very full, than perhaps it was enough to place the aircraft out of the rear w&b limit. At 139 pax, I assume that there were about 40 empty seats and if these were in the wrong place, it could create a w&b, or more precisely a balance problem.

Anyway, I'm sure the captain didn't do it for fun :} IIRC there was an incident with an A320 at LGW some years ago, where it ended sitting on its tail due to w&b challenges.

Perhaps a kindly airline pilot will see my reply and correct any errors and omissions in my deductive logic.

[Torque2]

Final, no, your basics are valid. It has been seen sometimes that the aircraft is loaded from row1 backwards which leaves the situation that you outline.
Baggage may be loaded, as you say, more to the rear than desired, there are a lot of people involved in getting an aircraft away and of course that means human error can creep in.
Another situation can be that on a lightly loaded aircraft some people just disregard their seating allocation and pick a relatively empty section thereby undoing the good efforts of check-in staff etc. :ok:

[Taffy1]

An ex dispatch/load controller point of view.

From what i can remember the 320 can be a bit "taily" (trim towards rear) with all bags in the rear hold and a medium load in the cabin, all thats needed is a few extra bags per pax and/or not all pax turning up that were pre allocated seats in fwd/mid cabin and the trim shoots back.

All the little busses (319/320/321), unless they were full, needed pax distribution to be even between all cabins, and loading instructions be ammened as per booked pax figure and not left as standard. The bigger the aircraft the more forgiving they are!!

Hope that helps:)