Different Things Used For Ballast
 

Coming to the end of the summer programme and one flight from Norwich to Jersey on a BAe ATP was empty. The aircraft needed 600kgs of ballast to trim and the only thing they could find were paving stones from the staff car park!!


Also ballasted an aircraft with the airport fire service barbeque before.......

A321 - Footie Charter, full flight no baggage. Used 4*757 Main Wheels for ballast.

Most often will uplift surplus fuel, and if this is not an option, frustrated pilot goes without!

I'm not suggesting it for your application and thinking about it now it might not have been such a good idea, but years ago we used very strong 20 litre water containers on the TriLanders for ballast, empty them out when you get to the other end....

We used to use water containers in the front end of B727's, then we began using big bags of sand... both palletised! Rather tail heavy are the ol' 72's........... good days.........

OJ

Once used 3 people from a handeling agent as ballast to psn an empty a/c.
God knows how much that cost !

Once had an ATP north of Hadrians Wall in urgent need of ballast so they crew went down to Homebase and bought a load of shingle!!!

On our old DC-10 MX Ferry flights - nice old trick of unusable fuel in the tanks to act as ballast.

Having offloaded the canisters of water from the rear hold the handling agent topped up his radiator on his minibus - forgot to tell him it was seawater!

I suppose you could always use the increasingly pointless additions to the paperwork. ;)

Used a few packs of inflight mags (20kgs each) in the back of a jetstream before to get it in trim for a ferry flight with flight deck crew only.

F.T.L

We used to use those big heavy plastic things that are used to hold temporary fences up - construction work at an airport can be useful sometimes !!

Heard of breeze blocks being used too.

Isn't it weired though how you send ballast out and never see it again, but at every airport there is never any ballast when you need it. - Where does it all go ???

:)

Leezyjet,

I may have an answer there! Whilst working at Schiphol I needed to get hold of some ballast. One of my Dutch colleagues gave me a phone number and I rang it to be answered with....(in Dutch)..."ballast department!" Never found out where on the airport it was but ever since I've had visions of a man in a room stuffed full of sandbags waiting for the phone to ring!

PHX

1 Case of Dinkerlaker, from STR, = about 10kgs, about 25 cases would get a G1 back from Germany, in the old Birmex days.

had an flight earlier and i just used me!!! back now for some fun and frolics on the ramp....

20 litre water containers on one flight got to the other end started to empty out onto the pan.........turns out they had been filled with avtur...mmmmm

Capt's wallet after long haul trip!

bmi and bmi regional make use of these things as well, what look like the same "ballast blocks" weigh 20 kgs for mainline and 22kgs for regional. The only difference must be the heavier spray paint highlighting either "bmi lhr" or "bmi reg" ! :rolleyes: