Originally Posted by
MojaveFlyer
Yesterday we flew RNO-DEN and DEN-BOS. On both flights, there were multiple announcements that there were "weight restrictions" which would prevent more bags from being put in the hold, so if the overheads were full and pax had bags they would need to be offloaded "which would delay your flight". This was accompanied by repeated exhortations to put anything small under the seat in front of you.
Was this just coincidence, I wonder, or is it part of a new campaign to get on time departures by not needed to check bags carried on? It was not unusually hot at either airport, for the seasons, and winds did not appear to be an issue given our in air flight times.
As someone mentioned, it is how the bags are accounted for. For the most part, on most regularly scheduled commercial airline flights (exception for charters carrying like a football team), every male weighs 200 lbs in summer and 205 lbs in winter, and females are 179 in the summer and 184 in the winter, including all carry-on baggage/personal items/outerwear in the winter.
So, if all roller bags, for example, ride in the cabin, they are already accounted for in the passenger weight. Checked bags down below weigh 30 lbs each, with 50 lbs typically used for heavy bags (some use 40 like Frontier not only to charge overweight but for reasons in their own weight and balance program). So, any carry-on that is checked into the hold goes from being included in your weight to being 30 extra lbs to add to aircraft weight in the paper exercise.
Thus, you have a flight that's optimized for range/weight/fuel, as you mentioned perhaps for weather/temperature, adding a few hundred more pounds could have an impact and may even mean not adding a standby passenger, or worst case having to get a volunteer. United even for the winter had to block seats on its 757s because of the increase in standard passenger weights last year.
In my airline days, I once had at my station an A320 departing from my east coast location for Las Vegas on New Years Eve. Of course it was full. At the end of boarding, the dispatcher called for more fuel and a weight reduction due to an ATC reroute. My wonderful employees are the gate called down to me and thought that since it was NYE and Vegas that begging 4 people to get off the plane, in exchange for a flight tomorrow (I couldn't even buy them a ticket on another airline - they were sold out), that job fit the general manager job description and had some comment about hazard pay. $1000, hotel, meals, and a ticket at 6am the next morning on another airline wouldn't get anybody to budge (not that I figured it would), so I dutifully informed the passengers that because of this, the last 24 checked bags loaded would be pulled off at random so that many folks won't have their NYE party clothes. The Captain called into operations later laughing he thought the plane was going to tip to the side as so many people were trying to look out the right side windows at which bags were coming back down the beltloader.