Originally Posted by
ajGoes
Each time a flight you're on makes a successful takeoff, one of the reasons is that the airplane was loaded with correct attention to weight and balance. Each standard passenger counts as about 170 lbs. in the calculation. The weight affects the balance differently depending on its distance from the center of lift, which is somewhere around the wing. The weight of, say, twenty standard passengers thirty feet behind the wing could make the difference between a takeoff and a crash at the end of the runway.
Originally Posted by
Xyzzy
Sure -- but bags count f
r weight too, One could easily have added baggage to the quoted list. In this case...
Apparently I was unclear up post, but how do they calculate weight if the passengers are not "standard...170 lbs".
What if the passengers are e.g. a large professional football players? What if they were a gaggle of small choir boys?
Do the airlines personnel look at the real situation (not standard size) and change the weight calculation or do they blindly calculate 170lbs/person?