Originally Posted by
APC225
United Overweight Plane Takeoff Prompts Changes - Businessweek
A computer breakdown caused a United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL) flight to take off earlier this year about 20,000 pounds (9,071 kilograms) heavier than pilots believed, prompting the carrier to add extra checks to ensure accurate weight calculations...
United sent pilots a weight estimate that assumed the coach section of the Boeing Co. (BA) 737-900 was empty when it was full, according to three people familiar with the incident who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak about it.
While the pilots, who didn’t catch the mistake, had difficulty getting the jetliner airborne, the plane wasn’t damaged and the flight was completed without incident, one of the people familiar with the event said. The pilots reported the trouble to a United program that encourages employees to identify safety issues, according to another person.
“Earlier this year, we experienced technology issues in capturing correct passenger counts on a small number of our flights,” Megan McCarthy, a spokeswoman for the airline, said in an e-mail yesterday.
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I hate to be the cold water on a UCH IT dissing party, but this was a "neuron-challenged" gate agent problem...not a computer problem.
The "A" students in question did not initialize the gate reader program correctly, nor did they update SHARES when they started to board the aircraft with an uninitialized gate reader, nor did they inform the flight crew that a manual reconciliation was necessary. Check out their new bulletins on boarding as a result of this...there is a new software block so that they can't even close the record until SHARES and the gatereader are reconciled. Bulletins are on their website.
Unfortunately, it also brings into question the "neuron count" of the pilots..."0" pax in coach on the W/B while 100 or so pax streamed onto the airplane during the boarding process.
A sad subject for another day.