Weight & Balance
 

Does any one know of a simple PC programme for calculating weight and balance? Alternatively has any one done a spreadsheet for the popular a/c types?

Yes, several, what exactly are you trying to do?

G

Done one for *my* aircraft, but it's not a lot of use for anything else.

Easy enough to do, in Excel. In fact, dead easy.

I bought NavBox ProPlan last year, and that does it for you (enter the parameters once).

Sigma MiXi
 

Weight and balance is just a matter of summing
weight x distance for all the items added to an
aircraft - which starts with its own initial weight and
balance point.

It is very amenable to a simple spreadsheet on
a programmable calculator, PDA or computer.

It is a ten minute job with Excel and the flight manual
and doing it yourself and checking that it is giving
sensible and correct answers will make your
understanding of the subject far better than
simply plugging figures into someone elses
program,

-- Andrew


-- Andrew

Jeppeson makes a wonderful flight computer that retails for $110 Canadian. Pocket-sized, calulates W/B, wind, speed/distance, fuel flow and a few other things. Why filddle with a PC when you can do the numbers in the cockpit with the docs right in front of you?

I've been meaning to create a spreadsheet for a while - should be easy to have the details for several different aircraft in there, and to just select the one you want each time. I'll post it when I've done it if anyone wants it.
I tend to agree though that this might lead to simply accepting the numbers given without thinking it through - so need to be very careful when using this method. Like any calculation, have a good idea of what the result should be before doing it.

One thing it would be useful for are problems where you need to work backwards without knowing the actual weights, e.g. If I'm fully fuelled, and I weigh X, what is the max weight I can carry in the back seat?" or "If I take mum and dad up, how much fuel can I carry?". This always seems a bit harder to calculate manually, but I'm just lazy.

As has been said, it's really really easy to use Excel. I've got one for my Tiger, if you're interested as guidance.

Flightstar does W&B. you can either select one of the many types of aircraft, to give you an idea, or create your own, for a particular aircraft. Gives you a W&B report too, with the envelope etc.

I wrote a program for the PocketPC to calculate W&B. No graphs or anything, just gives the weight and CofG position based upon your inputs and its up to the user to plot this on the graph in the POH.

Cheers
EA
;)