Overfueling as a reason for delay?
 

This is a new one to me. My Frontier flight's departure yesterday was delayed 1-1/2 hours according to the pilot because of "overfueling," which then required a supervisor, paperwork and removal of some of the fuel. The flight had only 5 empty seats at that point (which they subsequently filled with standby passengers).

Has anyone else been given this reason for a flight delay? I'm not sure I understand how it is possible to overfuel a full flight, but I wonder whether it is related in any way to the spirit of ULCCness from the new Overlord.

Frustrating, because we were showing an early arrival time originally but ended up getting in over an hour late with a full complement of passengers either having missed or sprinting to make tight connections. And surprising, because with all the weather issues going on all over the country, I would have expected the problem to be attributed to that.

Airlines are trying harder than ever to take off with exactly the right amount of fuel (required fuel for the flight plus FAA required reserves). Every extra gallon of fuel on board makes the plane heavier and therefore it burns more fuel to carry that excess fuel. That adds to the costs and they are doing everything to keep costs down. However, having the airplane on the ground is also costing money, since the flight is going to be late, meaning they have to keep ground personnel around (possibly with overtime). That fact may be too complex for people in charge of just making sure that the plane takes off with the right amount of fuel.

I remember one time in the late 1990's on United, getting ready to take off from LAS, when the pilot came on and said "we have just a bit too much fuel on board, we are going to pull over here and burn a little bit off before we take off." Sure enough, we taxied out over to a pad off the B taxiway approaching 25R, he set the engines to about 30% (my guess) and we burned fuel for about 5-10 minutes, then we were good to go. I doubt I will experience that again!

Having too much fuel onboard is a weight issue, and when it puts you above legal weights to take off or land you have to remove weight.

In some cases, especially if the overweight is small they will bump some cargo, bags or passengers. Doing that is usually a lot faster than having fuel offloaded, but it may have been a case where those were not reasonable options.

Carrying unneeded fuel weight does cause them to burn more fuel to fly AAA-BBB, just as any weight does. But I very, very much doubt they'd ever offload fuel and cause a delay simply to fly a lighter plane. Decision-makers are incented on on-time performance, and the cost of missed connections and the cost of offload the fuel are both something they want to avoid.

I understand the weight issue of the fuel, but I'm wondering how, given that most of the flights I've been on lately on Frontier are nearly or completely full, they end up overfueling in the first place.

for jeffco to take a 1 1/2 hr delay to defuel says a lot of fuel had to come off, my guess is they were planning on tankering the fuel due to higher fuel prices downline. just a thought