acl65pilot

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.

NWA320pilot

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.

DAL 88 Driver

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.

CVG767A

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

hoserpilot

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.

Bucking Bar

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.

Bucking Bar

Beech / Raytheon had the correct written description of the elevator rigging and a diagram which showed the connection for the trim cables reversed from what they should have been.

Guess what ... mechanics followed the picture and connected the trim servos backwards.

Hoser

I see this often in ATL, non rev or rev, and it's due to the emphasis of being on time. Departing a few minutes late in order to get as many on board is a no brainer to most pilots, but the gate controls the boarding process. DAL management puts the pressure on the agents to accomplish this. See it in ATL and in BHM where I commute from, although the DAL gate agents in BHM are great and usually get everyone on board, rev and non rev. I think DAL ought to change being adamant about getting out on time and ****ing off rev passengers who don't get on, not to mention non revs.

Hoser

iceman49

I would imagine that connect times will change to reflect the emphasis on the on time dep. The pax want to depart on time and get to the destination on time...do you delay the entire flight for one or two pax? Instead of 2 pax mad, you have 148 not happy. The schedule adjustment will be on going.

Jabberwock

Never mind.