Easy Jet flight overweight - 4 Pax disembarked

[A2QFI]

I read this in a UK Tabloid

"One passenger, Simon Lay, told the press about the odd incident. He said that the plane was delayed by an hour and a half because the combination of passengers and their luggage was 300kg over the weight limit.

He told the Liverpool Echo that the airline offered £100 to anyone prepared to leave the flight, but there were no volunteers. Then a group of passengers clubbed together to bump it up to £200 per person, and four volunteers appeared."

SFAIK passengers are assumed to be a certain weight, checked baggage is weighed but hand luggage isn't so how did anyone know that the aircraft was overweight and by how much?

[BN2A]

Structurally overweight, or performance limited by runway/weather concerned that day?? Ski flight?? Route to be flown?? En route winds back from 6+ hours away??

There are many variables...

[172_driver]

SFAIK passengers are assumed to be a certain weight, checked baggage is weighed but hand luggage isn't so how did anyone know that the aircraft was overweight and by how much?

Checked baggage is normally a standard weight as well. Hand luggage is included in passenger weight. The aircraft may have been 2 tonnes overweight for all we know.. but on paper it was just 300 kg.

[Tranceaddict]

Checked baggage is normally a standard weight as well.

EZY use actual baggage weights and standard PAX weights which included hand luggage

[DaveReidUK]

the airline offered £100 to anyone prepared to leave the flight, but there were no volunteers. Then a group of passengers clubbed together to bump it up to £200 per person, and four volunteers appeared.

Very public-spirited, but misguided and unnecessary.

If everyone had held their nerve, EZY would have themselves upped the incentive until they had enough volunteers, and nobody would have been out of pocket.

Worth reading this account of the event on AOL, if only for some of the ludicrous comments: EasyJet passengers whip round before take-off - AOL Money UK

[Anansis]

Structurally overweight, or performance limited by runway/weather concerned that day?? Ski flight?? Route to be flown?? En route winds back from 6+ hours away??

There are many variables...

In around 2006 I took an Easyjet flight out of LPL. After a short delay post boarding, the captain announced that an error light was indicating that one of the overwing exit slides was faulty. Long story short, they couldn't be certain that the slide would work in the event of an accident, which reduced the maximum passenger capacity of the aircraft below the number of passengers on the plane. They offered £100 to people who were prepared to rebook on a later flight.

I'd be very surprised if this aircraft was structurally overweight, even if it was laden down with heavy ski's- Liverpool to Geneva is a short journey for an A319. There's almost certainly much more to this story than is indicated in the article.

If it's true that passengers clubbed together to increase the compensation offered for volunteers to leave the flight, then this would be very bad PR for Easyjet. They seem to be trying very hard to differentiate themselves as a 'value' airline, rather than a 'budget' carrier.

[Piltdown Man]

Aircraft overweight? No problem. Keep calm, stay seated until €250 and a free flight comes your way. I hope EasyJet weren't trying to escape with just £100. Also, the flight has to arrive within three hours of schedule otherwise everybody gets a bung. It's worth a look here.

PM

[AlpineSkier]

The article said that the overweight was "caused " by the unusual distribution of men/women on this flight. From memory there were something like 120 men and only 15 women instead of the assumed 50/50 (ish ) and since men are calculated as weighing 10-15 kg more than women, this gave the "theoretical " excess.

[FairWeatherFlyer]

The only thing you know for certain will be Michael O'leary reading this and dreaming of charging by the passenger kilo

[BN2A]

Michael O'Leary reads Pprune???

What's his username??????

[ExXB]

Something doesn't seem right here. Liverpool's runway is 2286m in length and even at maximum weight that should be plenty long enough. MTOW is around 75t vs an empty weight of 41t for an A319. (Or 213kg for each of the 159 passengers)

LPL-GVA is just over 1000km, a relatively short flight for an aircraft with a (fully loaded) range of 6,700km. (Yes, I know, holding and alternatives could add 30-50%)

[DaveReidUK]

LPL-GVA is just over 1000km, a relatively short flight for an aircraft with a (fully loaded) range of 6,700km. (Yes, I know, holding and alternatives could add 30-50%)

The LPL-GVA sector fuel would be irrelevant if fuel was being tankered for subsequent legs as well. Full pax+full fuel will take an A319 to pretty well MTOW, or above, depending on assumed pax+baggage weight.

It's a lot easier to offload pax at short notice than fuel.

[Sunnyjohn]

Thanks for that link, PM. I've printed off the information and we will carry it with us in our hand luggage. So far we've been lucky, but you never know . . .

[ExXB]

Originally Posted by DaveReidUK

It's a lot easier to offload pax at short notice than fuel.

Sorry, you are right. my mistake was in thinking Squezzy was in the business of flying pax to their destination. They've handled this very poorly, if the press reports are to be believed.

Edited to add: their statutory minimum was to provide any passengers denied boarding with €250 (£210) and with a rerouting. They appear to have breached Regulation 261 here.

Note that the regulation provides no excuse for denied boarding, no "extraordinary circumstances" defense in this case.

[Yellow Sun]

Originally Posted by DaveReidUK
It's a lot easier to offload pax at short notice than fuel.

Sorry, you are right. my mistake was in thinking Squezzy was in the business of flying pax to their destination. They've handled this very poorly, if the press reports are to be believed.
20th Jan 2013 19:13

Unless of course the limiting parameter is Max Zero Fuel Weight in which case you will have no choice other than to offload payload.

YS

[Lord Spandex Masher]

The LPL-GVA sector fuel would be irrelevant if fuel was being tankered for subsequent legs as well.

Of course if they're silly enough to load tankering fuel instead of passengers...

It's a lot easier to offload pax at short notice than fuel.

It's also quite simple to find out the final ZFW before uplifting fuel to avoid having to offload either.

[DaveReidUK]

It's also quite simple to find out the final ZFW before uplifting fuel to avoid having to offload either.

As, no doubt, it would have been.

It was clearly later on in the proceedings that it dawned on EZY that the abnormal male/female pax ratio was likely to have resulted in a higher ZFW than that assumed.

See post #8.

[Lord Spandex Masher]

Hang on, if they knew the final ZFW why wouldn't they spot the weight problem then?

[DaveReidUK]

Hang on, if they knew the final ZFW why wouldn't they spot the weight problem then?

It's a while since I last saw a loadsheet, but all the ones I've ever encountered have used a standard passenger weight, which obviously implies a typical adult male/female pax ratio and hence weight (84kg in this dummy example):



Clearly if the actual mix is far from typical (as in this case), the loadsheet won't reflect the true ZFW. I'm not saying that the difference would be critical, but in this instance somebody obviously did think it was.

[Lord Spandex Masher]

Yes, that's the all adult weight. The male/female weights are 88kg and 70kg respectively. In this instance using the all adult weight gives a 'weight' 270kg less. Both processes are legal, obviously.

With the final ZFW based on either they would have been overweight so should have spotted it before they'd loaded, everybody, every bag and all that fuel no?