Originally Posted by
gregmchicago
Many years ago, I knew a UA 727 captain. He told me about a LGA-ORD flight he piloted that was overweight. (LGA's short runways often result in limited takeoff weight for airplanes.) Dispatch didn't notice until all the passengers had boarded.
Rather than de-fuel, dispatch told him to go back and make a couple of passengers get off the plane.
His response was that he was not going to risk his life by telling New Yorkers to get off.
After a delay, the plane was moved to a runup area and ran the engines on the ground for about 20 minutes to burn off fuel.
I had the same thing on a very full UA DEN-YVR flight a while back.
It was really, really hot and, listening in on Channel 9, UA Ops was trying to tell the Captain that they were going to offload pax for performance reasons. He said No, unload some cargo. They said No. So they worked out another solution.
After sitting in the penalty box for 45 minutes, they offloaded fuel and we were off. With a new flight number (which they had to constantly explain to ATC) and a refuelling stop in GEG. Truly a cluster.