Originally Posted by sailingfun

If you look at the fuel burn the aircraft had to have gone with full fuel for 8:40 minutes. Using the lightest operating empty weight airbus publishes that leaves about 37,000 lbs of payload. The article I saw said aircraft was full. FAA winter weights are 195lbs per passenger. If it was full they had 225 onboard with crew. No matter how you slice the pie the numbers don’t allow much if anything in the belly.