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Old 12-05-2008 | 01:56 PM
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Cubdriver
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Originally Posted by FastDEW
About 15 years ago I was with some friends and we rented a Cesna 172 for the afternoon. I was about 240lbs, the two of them both about 180lbs so the total wt was 600lbs plus fuel and jackets and a few other items. We flew it out to Catalina for lunch.

My question - Were we over the wt limit? How bad was this? Were we actually lucky we didnt crash? FYI - My fat but was in the back seat....
There is no way to know unless you obtain all the numbers and crunch them to find out. It does sound like you were over gross by a little bit, depending on what model it was and whether it has the 160 engine or the 180hp engine.

I suggest you look up the max takeoff wt., useful load, and the fuel capacity of your airplane and reconstruct the scenario using real numbers.

Even if you were under gross you may have come close to exceeding the runway length, obstacle clearance, CG limits, or all of these. The climb rate of a fully loaded 160hp Skyhawk can be well under 500 fpm on a hot day, as little as 150 fpm on a hot day at a mountainous airport.

Many general aviation pilots think that only mountainous airports offer risky conditions on hot day ("hot and high"), but they fail to realize it is density altitude that counts, not pressure altitude. Density altitude is normally around 3,000 minimum on a typical summer day, and goes up from there. You may be operating in 4,500 ft density altitude on a hot summer day where the local elevation is only 1,000 msl. Imagine how high this figure could be if the local elevation is already 5,000 ft. It may well be 9,000 density altitude or so. The airplane may not climb at all under such conditions, even if it is under gross limits.

Last edited by Cubdriver; 12-05-2008 at 02:22 PM.
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