Overloaded easyJet Plane Boots Passengers Off
You may have read about the recent incident on an easyJet flight in Europe, where 37 passengers were ordered off the plane because ground personnel had put too much fuel into the aircraft tanks, essentially making the plane too heavy to take off. The luggage of the remaining passengers also was removed and left in England, a fact they didn't discover until they'd landed in Switzerland.
Unfortunately, commercial flights are overloaded more often than you might think. The way an airline operates, and the options it chooses when it is overloaded, has a direct impact on business travelers.
Weight and Balance: Crucial components of safety
On a commercial passenger jet, there's little room for error. Before a plane is cleared for push back from the gate, the numbers have to add up: passenger and cargo weight, fuel amount (and weight), and then other factors weigh in (pun intended). Altitude of the airport affects airlift, windspeed and direction, both on the ground and in the air.
The formulas are relatively precise in terms of the operational limits of any airplane. In fact, the limits were established when the aircraft type was originally certified as airworthy.
OK, so far so good. But then there come the basic operational issues of the fine balance between passengers, cargo, range, fuel, and weight in the real world.
The Airline's Choice: Bump Passengers or Unload Fuel
Consider this story. I was on an American Airlines MD-80 flying from LaGuardia to Dallas. It was a full flight. We pushed back on time and got about 80 feet away from the gate and stopped. Another 30 minutes passed without a word from the cockpit or crew. Then the pilot came on the PA and said, "Folks, sorry to report this, but we're too heavy to fly."
The pilot then explained he had a choice. To be able to take off within safety margins he either had to bump 10 passengers from the flight or take off 3,500 pounds of jet fuel, a process that could easily take an hour.
In the airline business where connections are critical moving one chess piece can often mean ruining the entire game. The simple solution would have been to deplane 10 people, give them vouchers good on subsequent flights, push back and take off. But American opted instead to take the fuel off. That meant an hour delay, but as we soon discovered, it meant more than that.
About 65 minutes late, we pushed back again, with the same full complement of passengers and headed to Dallas, flying into the same headwinds.
An hour into the flight the captain gave us more bad news. We were now out of fuel and would have to make an unscheduled stop in...Little Rock, Arkansas
You can just about guess the rest. We landed in Dallas two and a half hours behind schedule, which meant about 95 passengers (and their bags) misconnected. The cost, in terms of fuel, delays, lost productivity and onward connections of that particular plane are hard to calculate, but not hard to estimate: huge.
Passengers: Bumping is Better
And the lessons learned now need to be applied. Sometimes it's better to be bumped from a flight with weight issues and take another plane (a later American flight from LaGuardia actually landed ahead of us!) than to wait for the weight issues to be resolved. This particular tarmac delay could have been easily avoided.
Common sense dictated removing the 10 passengers. But that didn't happen. And it might not happen again, which of course means that asking for, or expecting common sense in the airline business might just be asking for too much...next time this happens (and I suspect it will) I will volunteer for denied boarding and take my chances on another flight. And you should too.
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