PurdueFlyer

My agent days ended in 2010, and yes we would have to do the "kid count" when close to a payload margin. It was always a goat rope. Thankfully, thats a thing of the past. Now that TSA "SecureFlight" data is required to be entered in the PNR, the load planning software just reads the birthdates for the whole manifest and automatically applies the proper weight (child vs adult vs infant) based on the passenger's age. I forget what the cutoff age is, its either 8 or 11 I think, but the computer figures it all out automatically. No more kid counts!

As an aside, I flew BDL-ATL last Saturday (the day of the ATL diversion-fest). MD-90. I actually looked at the dispatch release. We carried fuel for:

BDL-ATL trip time of 1 hour 50 minutes
MEM & BNA alternates (MEM being the further of those two) ... 50 minutes
FAA required domestic fuel reserve of 45 minutes
"contingency" fuel (dispatch decides how much to add here) ... 65 minutes.

So that's basically 4 hours and 30 minutes worth of gas on that narrowbody. Some days you need to carry those kinds of fuel loads. Luckily the flight was only 2/3 full ...

flyerCO

I never said it's always cargo. I know quite a few DL mainline pilots. They're the ones that told me the vast majority of time it's cargo causing the issue. Needing extra fuel can also cause issues with cargo, as extra weight for fuel, means less weight for cargo.

ijgordon

I'm not talking about any technical reasons. It seems odd and unnecessary to make a public announcement for all bags to go as carryon at the gate. How many passengers voluntarily ask to check bags once they're already through security and at the gate? Couldn't the GA just tell those passengers directly that they'll need to carry them on? I don't understand the purpose of a big announcement.

HDQDD

Congrats on knowing DL pilots! I am so impressed! Now go ask your buddies to look at the weather on the day in question between two very busy airports. I'm sure they'll let you know that this was due to extra fuel and not "cargo".

I also know quite a few ATPs from many different airlines (yeay!), but I can tell you that few pilots have any idea what goes on down on with cargo load planning. I've also worked in Local Ops (specifically: load planning), SystemOps, agent/supervisor and on the ramp as a ramper and a manager.

Now that that's out of the way: Pilots may consider cargo and bags to be the same. At the end of the day, for their purposes, the distinction between the two isn't important. They just need to know the weights (MTOW, etc.) and CG (additional info also required for HAZMAT, life saving organs, etc.). Nowadays most of these weight and balance calculations are made on the ground and sent to the plane via ACARS to set trim,Vx settings etc. An hour or so before the flight, the load planner in ops usually has a very good idea of how close a flight will be based on planned load and planned cargo (not bags) for a flight. If it's going to be close, cargo (not bags) is held off until it's clear they won't be overweight with it.

Wide bodies: It's actually quite common for wide body international flights to be "overbooked" with cargo. Ramp will load by the cargo's priority according to their plan. If they have to cut cargo due to weight or bulk it just goes on another flight. Bags outrank cargo with few exceptions (i.e. AOG parts), so they are priority. The tricky part is that cargo is loaded first, bags last. So at the end you may end up with say an extra LD3 position that isn't used and a LD8 skillet that won't fit in that spot. This is a place where it's good to have a ramp lead with a lot of experience.

Narrow bodies: It's rare that a domestic narrow body is overweight due to its cargo alone. More likely they would "bulkout" (run out of space). But same rules apply. If it's close they can load the cargo last. It's usually easier on narrow bodies, because cargo won't be in containers or on skillets.

Cargo and fuel still come out of the same overall weight bucket. All things being equal, if you add more fuel, you'll have to take cargo or pax off to get back within limits. Same thing if you added more cargo, but like I said above, this is usually planned in advance. Software does a great job predicting how many bags they'll have and the load planner should have exact cargo weights transmitted from the cargo office (they weigh it). Fuel loads are also planned in advance by a dispatcher (usually and hour or two before a flight), but in cases like this with a major weather system up and down the East Coast, as weather changes, it may be necessary to add fuel. It's easy for a pilot to say the "cargo" caused it to be overweight, but for narrowbodies, cargo doesn't fluctuate much from the plan. In weather situations, fuel load can and does especially when you have 500mi of cells to pick your way through or a far longer flight plan than normal to avoid those TS.

TL;DR: It's more self serving for a pilot to say "cargo made us overweight" than say, "the extra fuel we added, at pilot discretion, made us overweight".

mayhem

Probably does help the first ones on the plane be a bit more cognizant of the fact that there is limited space, and that they should place their rollaboards in "the right way" and take their personal item under their seat. The FAs can only do so much to rearrange bags, and rarely will ask people to take a personal item below the seat in front of them after they've put it up already since it's not very customer friendly

Troppy

ijgordon

Hmm, well they should probably always be making that announcement for the convenience of passengers, but I guess it makes sense in that context.