Loading horror stories

[virgo]

I've been asked to help prepare a presentation to aeronautical students on aircraft loading and C of G.

Many thanks for the photos you've provided which very visually demonstrate the effect of mistakes before they got airbourne.

Has anyone any horror stories we can use to amplify the nightmare of getting into the air with the weight/C of G out of limits ?

If anyone can help, please reply here or at ;
[email protected]

Many thanks. If we can prevent just one cock-up, the effort will be worthwhile.

[Cornish Jack]

G'day Alan
I suspect one of the most recent (and most obvious) examples was the F27?? doing the night newspaper run to the Channel Islands. Load improperly secured and slipped during the approach putting it MEGA tail heavy. Can't remember all the details but there will be a CAA write up and there was a fair sized thread on Pprune. Anyone else got more details??
Additionally, the Fedex?? freighter out of a Miami area airport which had a load slip on rotation and crashed.
Going back a bit, we were staging out of Khartoum at midday on a Beverley. Never going to have a LOT of spare performance, but this day it didn't want to climb at all. Had a VERY close view of the palm trees with a R.o.C. in the tens of fpm. The Bev was going back to UK for a heavy overhaul after some time operating in Aden. We later heard that on the strip-down they found a large quantity of sand in the space between the freight-bay floor and the skin - about 4000 lbs!! :eek: Thank you, Mr Bristol, for the Centaurus!
Back a bit further - APCSS (later 84 Sqdn) operating Valettas returning to Aden from Nairobi. Food in Aden was diabolical, thus the Nairobi run used to be inundated by orders for the Nairobi Cold Store for meat, milk etc. Accommodating 'Siggie' took and filled a very large order which was duly delivered direct to the aircraft just before engine start. "Put it in the chain stowage" suggests recipient. This was done but the chain stowage was right at the back of the fuselage. Result? Extended attempted take-off due to an inability to raise the tail!! ... plus VERY hot brakes.
It's happened before, and, like most aviation mishaps, will happen again. Best maxim?? ... NEVER assume - CHECK!!

[Tex]

Actually, the Miami was not FedEx. It was a Fine Air DC-8.

Also, an Emery DC-8 in California has a load shift a couple years ago.

Both crashes fatal to the crews.

[wonderbusdriver]

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi_bin/view_details.cgi?date=08071997&airline=Fine+Air

is about the one DC8 incident.

Try the same site for more info on other incidents.

[Spitoon]

Jack mentioned the Channel Express accident at Guernsey. Full report atAAIB site (http://www.aaib.dft.gov.uk/formal/gchnl/gchnl.htm).

[744rules]

a few years ago, a 734 barely got airborne, because late passengers just took the empty seats in the cabin, which resulted in the aircraft be out of trim.

[jar66_b2]

wasn't there a Korean Air 747 in Sydney earlier this year parked on it's tail?

Sure I saw pic on http://www.airliners.net

[Cornish Jack]

One further incident comes to mind which may be in the 'urban myth' category.
An internal flight to Las Vegas some years back reported a huge unexplained performance decrease - extended take-off run, low climb rate etc. All the load sheets checked out OK and the subsequent flight test was fine. A little further investigation revealed that the pax were all members of a numismatists club attending a conference in LV. Sooo ... ?? Numismatists, not surprisingly, like to carry their (very valuable) collections with them in their cabin bags. Each one had a sizeable collection of gold coins, in combination amounting to some ridiculous amount of unweighed load. Moral - money definitely CAN be the root of SOME evil. :D

[lomapaseo]

>a few years ago, a 734 barely got airborne, because late passengers just took the empty seats in the cabin, which resulted in the aircraft be out of trim.<

Happens everyday, need details please?

[Micky]

A few years ago wdl-aviation used to fly the Bild-Zeitung ( German sun) form Essen-Mülheim (EDLE) to other Airports in Germany. for this they used a Beech Baron or a Piper Senneca.
Well they had this pilot who got strapped in an then they started loding. (They being highly qualified people who diden't bother to fasten the cargo...:eek: )
Well during take off the whole load slipped backwards, resulting with the plan impacting with the ground to the left hand of the runway. Luckily the pilot was not injured...
But round about 3 mounths later same guy, same senario, but this time he was airborne for round about 5-10min bevor crashing on a schoolyard, killing himself! The radio masseges which were recorded were sopposingly not very nice...
Well I do not know how much is true about this but this a story which I was told in my W&B lessons...
Other people, at the club have told a similar story so there must be some truth in it...
If anybody has some more info. would be nice if you could forward it

Micky

[dusk2dawn]

Late 1980'ies a F27 crashed during app to Hannover due loading aft of cg limit.

[744rules]

the korean is australia was an md11 freighter and not a 747.

Will try to get the details of the 734, but might a while as i have to dig up some old files

[arcniz]

The Emery DC-8 report is here:

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi_bin/view_details.cgi?date=02162000&airline=Emery+Worldwide (http://http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi_bin/view_details.cgi?date=02162000&airline=Emery+Worldwide)


Final report evidently is not yet available. Aircraft developed serious control problems after rotation. Crew managed most of a low-altitude visual pattern for return to the field, but lost it on the 'base' leg as they were trying to transition to a landing configuration.

[744rules]

734 being out of trim
happened in 1994/no details about carrier or station
proportional seating conditions were assumed in stead of actual seating conditions. Cpt report shows : on the take-off run at Vr (about 150mph-240km/h) the control column was fully back giving max up elevator. the 737-400's nose wheel remained firmly on the ground.
As the end of the runway was getting closer, the cpt increased the stabilizer setting from that given on the loadsheet of 3.5 to 6.5, a line which is so far forward of the forward trim limit that it is not even shown on the balance chart. The a/c finally took off at a speed in excess of 200mph (325km/h)

[Lu Zuckerman]

Here is a story not of cargo shifting but cargo misbehaving. The story is being told a bit backwards.

A Russian transport made a cargo run to an island off the coast of Japan. The crew had not been paid in months nor, had they been fed properly for a lot longer than that. While walking around the airbase they spotted a cow. After several minutes of conversation they decided to take the cow back to their base in Russia. After take off the cow began to get unruly and was difficult to contain so sooner than damaging the aircraft they dumped the cow overboard at about 10,000 feet.

By pure chance the cow hit the stern of a Japanese fishing boat causing serious damage. So serious, the boat began to sink. A call was put out to the Japanese Coast Guard and by the time they arrived the boat was nearly submerged. A maritime court was convened to assign fault to determine if the insurance would cover the cost of a new vessel. When asked what happened the Skipper told the court that a cow hit his boat. With that the collective eyebrows of the court raised and the Skipper was accused of lying and could face jail time.

The story made many of the newspapers around the Pacific Rim and eventually got to Russia where it was read by some of the crew of the transport. They got the Skipper off the hook by telling the story that appears above.


:D

[virgo]

Thanks everyone............there's nothing like a true story to make people sit up and pay attention.
Lu, I'm not totally convinced your story is ABSOLUTELY true - I think I'll put it in the same category as the guy in the scuba diving kit found in the forest 20miles from the nearest water !!!

[mr.777]

Got a little yarn about a Kuwaiti A300 out of trim in flight.
Used to be a dispatcher(one of the proper ones that did load planning/loadsheets etc)for AF and we used to handle them at LHR.
Anyway a fellow dispatcher,who happens to be a very good friend of mine and who will KILL me if he reads this(sorry mate!!)made a boo-boo at the load planning stage.When entering cargo details,he entered a pallet number as a cargo weight.....so what you might think?
Well,problem was that the pallet number was something like 1214 (i.e. he entered 1214kgs) and the pallet actually weighed something in excess of 5000kgs.
Somewhere in flight,the trim alarms went off on the flightdeck and the crew ended up having to move 20-30 pax from the last couple of rows of cattle class into 1st class to get the thing back into trim.Not good!

[hobie]

I remember a cargo flight (4 prop job) landing in SNN many years ago that ended up facing the wrong way, at the intended touch down end of runway 24 (just outside the perimeter fence) ....... never got to hear the full story but perhaps the sad thing about it was that the Skippers car was in the back!!!! ......

cheers .....

[Silkman]

Many years ago at MAN a Dispatcher did a manual loadsheet for a Northwest 747 freighter and being used to working with metric figures finalised the loadsheet in kilos instead of pounds.
The crew apparently had their feet on the dashboard pulling back on the stick on rotation !

[jlaherty]

Around 2000 a Piper Lance departed King Island in Bass Strait with 6 female 0pob. The a/c was observed to take a long take off run and assume a marked nose high attitude on rotation. The a/c continued nose high to about 200' stalled and impacted the overrun area of the runway. All on board were killed. The investigation is not posted on the ATSB BASI website for some reason. It was found that the a/c rear luggage compartment was overloaded and trim control was neutral.:(

[Wot No Engines]

Take a look at http://www.aaib.dft.gov.uk/bulletin/oct02/oyjrw.htm - I watched the end of this. Very lucky more were not hurt. The "small earth mound" is in fact a 15' high bank arroung an old bomb dump.

[sharpshot]

I don't know where you will find the details, but sometime back, 4-5 yrs ago, an IL-76 departed RAK in the UAE. He got airborne but only to a very low level and finally went off radar screens into the Gulf. It was reported in "Flight" and no doubt found in that year's annual accident survey.

Very common in that part of the world to load IL-76's by volume:eek:

I also recall reading about an Excalibur A.320 taxiing out at LGW looking more like a speedboat - had to come back to stand I think.
Can't remember whether bags in wrong hold or pax in wrong seats, but a serious C of G potential.

A common problem I used to note was when L.188's were either fitted with a front cargo door or a rear one and loaders tended to forget which one they were working in.
With the front end one, you had to keep shuffling the ULD's forward eveytime you took one off. I recall shouting pretty loudly when I felt one about to go:D :D

Hope this is of some help.

SS

[Cornish Jack]

One POTENTIAL 'gotcha' occurs in the 747-400. Trim is set relative to the load sheet MAC % and the resultant positioning of the 'green band'. Should the trim not be set correctly with respect to the 'green band', opening the throttles (sorry, thrust levers, for the pedants) will generate a warning. Similarly, that entered MAC% will be checked against the nose wheel oleo compression for gross error and should such an error be present, will generate a 'Stab green band' ADVISORY message. All seems pretty fool-proof so far, doesn't it.
However, suppose an incorrect MAC% is entered and the trim is set to the INCORRECT green band. Since the alerting message is an ADVISORY, there will be NO AURAL ALERT (and I can assure you that it is very easy to miss visual alerting messages) so off we go into the wide blue etc with an out of trim aircraft. But what about the take-off config warning? ( I hear you ask) IT WON'T WORK - because the aircraft has been trimmed to the INCORRECT green band and it is the presence of the trim in the green band logic which triggers the take-off warning!! As far as I know, it hasn't happened yet, but ........... be aware :eek:

[Dan Winterland]

There has been more than one example of a load of KGs being mistaken for Lbs. I think an RAF C130 was loaded as such during the Gulf War with unhappy consequences for the airframe. An inevitable incident (some might say) in an operation that uses both.

Also, I think there was a USAF C5 which came to an unhappy end during the Gulf War when an Abrams tank moved in the climb.

Both these stories will need verifying. Can anyone out there confirm?

[Capt Claret]

virgo, I learned about flying from that!

Several years ago, as PF and PIC of a DH8-300 I checked the manual load & trim sheet as prepared by the F/O. I think it was the F/O's first flight post check to line and there was pressure, both self imposed and from despatch staff to get going.

On rotate the aircraft fairly lept into the air. I hate to think how close we came to striking the tail.

Once 'safely' under way I rechecked the trim sheet. The F/O had un-knowingly allocated all the freight to the forward part of the baggage compartment, when in fact is was loaded in the aft part of the compartment. Our C of G was aft of the aft limit.

As PIC the responsibility was mine. I checked the trim sheet, but did so too hurredly to note the error.

On a slightly different tangent, it still surprises me how often manual trim sheets are filled out on the assumption that pax will spread themselves evenly through the cabin,

Just recently I insisted to an F/O that we get actual zone seating numbers to complete the trim. When we did so, the aircraft C of G was found to be forward of the forward limit and we had to move about 30% of the pax aft to trim the aircraft.

To my mind this was a great example of why one should not make assumptions.

[Tuba Mirum]

I appreciate this is chiefly a forum for pilots, but perhaps I may ask a question as SLF?

Some time ago I was on a KLM flight LHR-AMS which would normally have been fulfilled by a 737. On this occasion the aircraft was a MD-11, presumably for reasons of positioning.

I noticed that although the pax load (and, I would guess, the fuel load) was very light for a MD-11, a great deal of attention was paid to pax distribution. My question is, how far are C of G issues dependent on actual gross loading? To take an extreme example, if we have a 747 with (say) 50 pax on board, how critical is it that those pax be evenly distributed? I presume that a full load automatically ensures proper pax distribution, though presumably MGW issues then come into play.

[744rules]

note that pax are only part of the load carried. imbalance created by pax, often can be corrected by cargo, ballast and non-standard fuel distribution (fuel as ballast)

[Sensible Garage]

met the captain and saw the wreck, very narrow escape

14 CFRPart 135 operation of Air Taxi & Commuter AMERIFLIGHT, INC. Accident occurred Wednesday, August 13, 1997 at SEATTLE, WA Aircraft:Beech 1900C, registration: N3172A Injuries: 1 Serious.

The Beech 1900C cargo aircraft was loaded with more than 4,962 pounds of cargo during an approximate 20 minute period. No scale was available at the aircraft, forcing loaders to rely on tallying either waybill weights or estimates of total cargo weight and center of gravity (CG) during the brief loading period. Additionally, a strike had shut down a major cargo competitor at the time with substantial cargo overflow to the operator. Post-crash examination determined the cargo load was 656 pounds greater than that documented on the pilot's load manifest, and the CG was between 6.8 and 11.3 inches aft of the aft limit. The airplane behaved normally, according to the pilot, until he initiated full flaps for landing approaching the threshold of runway 34L at the Seattle-Tacoma International airport. At this time, the aircraft's airspeed began to decay rapidly and a high sink rate developed as the aircraft entered into a stall/mush condition. The aircraft then landed hard, overloading the nose and left-main landing gear which collapsed. A post-impact fuel system leak during the ground slide led to a post-crash fire.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows.

A stall/mush condition resulting from an aft center of gravity which was inaccurately provided to the pilot-in-command by contractual cargo-loading personnel. Additional causes were overloading of the aircraft's landing gear and fuel leakage resulting in a post-crash fire. Factors contributing to the accident were the pilot's improper lowering of flaps in an aft CG situation and the inadequate company procedures for cargo loading.

[SLF3]

There is a good story about a load shifting in 'Fate is the Hunter'.

[forget]

Saturday afternoon, 1978 or thereabouts. Seletar Airfield, Singapore. Sat on the patio of my old RAF bungalow with a cold one. Chatting with a friend when, from the far end of the runway (which we couldn’t see because of rising ground ) an ex Cathay Convair 880 starts to roll. Conversation ceases as 880's were well before noise was an issue. Noise gets louder, and louder, and louder, behind the rising ground. He should be airborne by now, and in sight. I start walking, and then running, towards the runway. Suddenly the noise ceases as the throttles are chopped. Noise starts again, but this time it's the tyres blowing. Run faster. Get to the top of the rise in time to see the aircraft run off the end and into the gravel. Run even faster. Nose leg has collapsed and aircraft shrouded in dust. Left forward door opens and slide pops out. Captain, dressed for the occasion in uniform jacket, rolls to the ground and sees me, wearing only a pair of shorts, heading in his direction. We meet and he looks at me. I'll never forget his instant explanation, which said it all. 'It wouldn't f---ing fly!'

Nor surprising. The empty aircraft was positioning to Paya Lebar, ten minutes away, for a trip to the middle east with oilies. It later turned out that some smart individual had loaded a huge drill bit, or something similar, in the forward hold. No way that it was going to fly. Mind you, if he had got it off the ground it's unlikely he could have kept it there, and the runway heading took you over a packed residential area. So all's well that ends well.

[Gainesy]

I vaguely remember reading a report about a US Marine Corps C-130 which was overloaded accidentally; part of the load was a large cross-country capable fork-lift; apparently the guy working out the loading read the safe working load of the vehicle (painted on the forks) as the weight of the vehicle (displayed somewhere not as easily seen). Can't remember what happened but someone else picked it up and it didn't even get as far as starting engines.
US Navy Aviation Safety website may be able to give you some other examples; back in a min with a link.

http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/media/approach/default.htm

[Touch'n'oops]

Working at Go, I remember there being a case of a despatcher who forgot 700Kgs of freight in the front hold!

The pilot found out when it came to rotate!!!!:eek: :eek:

Pilot reported aircraft being heavy!