Having paying pax left behind is a definite head scratcher...

Perhaps I am not up to speed on the definition of "oversold"... could it also mean that there are HKs that missed a previous flight / non-revs that exceed aircraft capacity?

Since the delay blame game is what we deal with, what should we as the pilots do (of your regional lift)? Send in crew comms to our company? I've had someone at mainline suggest I send in reports via DeltaNet but I don't really want to get into some trouble caused by going around the chain of command....

At comair the crew did a paper W & B, so we had the final say on our numbers, no load control etc. If the gate agent was trying to squeeze on an extra pax or two we could work the numbers and our dispatch was usually very cooperative about adjusting fuel, within safe limits.

That and no acars, so out time was whatever the captain told me to call it.

I just think the discrepancy is how different companies handle their loading and what different stations do. I heard there were times in DTW where mesaba ground agents (now regional elite or whatever) would refuse to load ballast on Pinnacle flights.

I had that thought years ago too... I actually had one of the investigators on my jumpseat after the PIT crash, and he had some very interesting things to say about it. It made me want to avoid the 737 for awhile... funny thing was that I wound up with over 5000 hours in it not too long after that...

What, you think that I have any original thoughts? :D That's where I heard that...:cool:

DAL88, I can tell you that when I did a flight that required an alternate farther away than CHQ or BHM from ATL we bumped pax for alternate fuel. The magic number was about 7400 lbs with 48 bags.

Just my experience with over 5K hrs in the thing. We were also using 47000 lbs for max landing.

Pinnacle leaves pax at the gate daily due to weight restrictions...... On a short 450 mile segment I routinely see 1-7 pax left. This is due to being dispatched with DTW (or other hub airport) as the alternate. Having an alternate that is almost 500 miles back to adds tons of fuel thus the landing weight restriction. I have no idea why they don't use an alternate closer to the destination, I have checked a few times and several were legal all within 100 NM. :confused:

Got it, ACL. Thanks. But the distinction I'm trying to make is the NUMBER of passengers that routinely need to be left. 1 or 2 doesn't surprise me at all. 6 does. And especially when you consider that, from what I'm reading here, the capability of the aircraft does not require 6 to be left... then it comes down to the way the aircraft is being operated by different carriers. If some of our DCI carriers are leaving people behind unnecessarily (i.e. that particular company's ops are structured in a way that causes this to happen), then I think that is a problem for Delta Air Lines and I think it needs to be fixed. After all, these are OUR passengers. Quality of product and customer service count. Our management seems to parrot this a lot, but when I see things like this I start to question whether they really mean it.

I saw 6 seats blocked frequently when commuting on a CRJ200 from CVG to JFK/LGA.

Many regional aircraft were adversely affected when the pax weights and bag weights were increased a few years back. Remember those Beech 1900's that crashed? Weights were raised and the mighty Brasilia turned into a 28 seat plane. 26 in the summer. The 50 seat RJ was now difficult to take a full load of pax. It was real pain to try and get a jumpseater on unless you could add balast. Before the weight increase there were minimal problems....at least in the mountain west.

The system has been revised.


IMHO, Boeing should have known better than to use a single valve to control the PCU on the most powerful flight control surface on the jet. They deflected litigation towards Parker Hannifin, but the source of the design was Boeing.

Anything and everything that is subjected to the stresses of flight eventually fails. Designs have to be fault tolerant. The original design wasn't.