Originally Posted by
LarryJ
Common problem when an airplane, that has already been fueled for a long flight, is swapped to a short flight. You can takeoff (though not leagally) with all the extra fuel but you'll be over your max landing weight at your destination and won't be able to legally land.
Thanks for the insight
Didn't realize the takeoff wouldn't be legal -- some of us were wondering why not just takeoff and burn the extra fuel to hit the MLW by taking a scenic route or doing some holding (in my being awake for 24+ hours since Lisbon delirium this made perfect sense in my head -- though now realizing that would probably equate to a 4-ish hour longer flight time).
The later clarification was that the real problem with us taking that aircraft was the "offensive smell" (I heard it described as an overwhelming mix of vomit and industrial cleaner from around row 25 to the back of the plane) was what ultimately made aircraft #2 a no-go. I feel like I've had maybe one minor (few thousand pounds / less than a half hour to defuel) overfueling in my years of flying -- can't tell you where it was, though -- but I've never had an aircraft rejected because "plane smells bad" before
-- I've also never seen the same flight have two frames rejected back-to-back for maintenance.
I'd love to know how no one noticed the smell deplaning the previous leg or during the ~6 hours it was on the ground (and presumably at either maintenance or a hardstand since the previous flight had arrived at the other end of IAD) -- but it also seems that that was not an easy problem to solve as after being pulled from our flight that frame was originally (re)assigned to operate flights this morning and as I'm typing this it appears it was pulled from those as well and is next scheduled to operate UA545 to AUS in a couple hours -- nearly 26 hours after it last arrived in IAD.
Edited to add: N37287 is still sitting in IAD -- UA545 wound up cancelling because "...we needed to take the plane out of service to address a technical issue. Your safety is our priority and we're sorry for the inconvenience." Next scheduled flight is to JAX at 8:54 tomorrow (UA2084) -- so whatever stunk up the plane seems to be awfully persistent since it will have been AOG for nearly ~45 hours.
Edit #2 - N37287 still in IAD as of 9:25 two days later -- now next scheduled flight is UA407 to BNA at 350pm -- now I'm really curious what the stench was
