200/700 Jumpseat W&B issues?
 

Question for you 200/700 drivers. I am on the 200 myself at ZW and wile I know it can be tight to get a jump seater on due to forward CG limits sometimes, we have over the years made many modifications to our fleet to move the BEW CG aft and that has made taking a jump seater a virtual nonissue for us.

My normal commute is 100% mainline so I have no experience with jumpsestimg on 200/700s outside of my own. The one time I tried to take a Piedmont 145 the CA said they never can make it work and I couldn’t get on. Didn’t even try. But I digress...

I am trying to get to my in-laws to be with my family on turkey day and have a 200 and 700 on Skywest as my 2 options. Both are full as one would expect so trying to see if Skywest has CG issues with either fleet types. I have mainline options to an airport further away but trying to get much closer.

Appreciate the insight. Happy Thanksgiving.

Ballast. Others have done it for me. I have done it for others. Good luck to you.

Lots of ballast on the 200. It can be an issue with an alternate because you end up overweight for landing. The solution is to reduce the fuel a little bit, but that doesn’t always work.

The 700 rarely has an issue. Sometimes with an empty 700, you actually have to add forward ballast.

We can make it work most of the time on the 200, Ive never actually had to tell someone no, came close once but made it work barely. Like they said ballast. We will work hard to make it work. The 700 is a non issue.

"Virtually"?
I've only tried to take a ZW jumpseat once and it "didn't work out".
What does the jumpseat have to do with the inlaws anyway?

The W&B didn’t work out? Must’ve been a new captain. Most of the guys I fly with have never had to leave a JS behind. I haven’t had to in a year.

on the -200 the issue only usually comes up if the flight has an alternate and or is tankering. Its usually a landing weight issue and that extra 1000-2000 lbs of gas limits how much ballast we can carry. the 700 should be a non issue unless you are going out of somewhere like ASE.

Contaminated runway or anti ice can take a huge bite out of payload on the deuce

If payload is limited you can't take the ballast needed for the JS.

I've been denied a couple of times for this on skywest. Show up early and hopefully their load control can factor you in?...

Thanks for everyone’s advice and info. Crew working it was great, ran the numbers early and said they could take me up front if needed (200).

A rev pax no showed and ended up getting a seat in the back anyway.

Thanks again to all and Happy Thanksgiving.

Since we're talking -200 w/b. I’ve always been curious. With the thousasands of hours in the 200 myself, I’ve never once needed ballast with a jump seater. I did not work at Skywest. Any idea why? All I can figure is we did things differently with our weight and balance and the feds signed off on it. I highly doubt it’s due to aircraft config. Any ideas?

Some carriers secure a weight somewhere in the tail, from what I have heard. If it's included as the basic operating CG, you wouldn't ever see the data.

Your w+b was probably reconfigured more favorably. I regularly need ballast even without a js. But moving fuel around within the release and burning fuel on the taxi out usually gives a way around having to boot a js

I haven't flown the deuce since june, but we almost always have to add ballast, and with a JS'er it was guarantee. 600lb's for DCA-RDU with a JS. The rampers were so thrilled.

ZW installed a 100lb plate in the tail and removed the fore coffee maker. Never left a JS behind and rarely needed ballast.

So they never had coffee

Still one pot of the world’s finest bacterial sludge.

I routinely get told no on OO 200 jumpseat going to/from work, which is on the longer end of what you all do out of atl. Seems like your guys out east either are too new to make it work or just don’t care to make it work. It’s bad enough that if there’s an alternate I don’t even waste my time.

Does the ACARS not give you a solution to make it work, in terms of adding ballast?

The problem is that adding ballast often pushes you over max landing weight on the CRJ-200, which is 47,000 lbs. With an alternate and no JS, you frequently are planned to land pretty close to that limitation already. The weight of a jumpseater + 400lbs of ballast can easily put you over that number. Winter weights for 50 pax add an extra 250lbs. Some of our -200s have a high forward moment even when empty. Some of them aren’t so bad. I’m sorry you’ve had difficulty getting to work. I think most of our captains would do everything they can within reason to get you on the junpseat. Sometimes it will work if we burn off some fuel. Sometimes it is truly impossible if you have a distant alternate and a particularly nose-heavy -200.

I fly the 200, I understand how it works. It's frustrating to see the numbers being worked and people being totally unwilling to burn fuel. I'm not going to question a captain's decision making process, it's their ship, run it as they see fit.

Couldn’t they
-burn more fuel?
-find a closer alternate?
-toss crew bags into the tail? (I’ve thrown a green tag on my lunch box before).
-use female weights for the FA (if applicable)
-get rid of an alternate if it isn’t legally required?

I don’t commute, but most of the horror stories I hear from my coworkers are from SKW. It seems like a lot of the time people just aren’t willing to try to make it work. I understand there are times when it truly can’t work but I have a hard time believing that happens as frequently as it seems. There are guys at my airline who have been flying the -200 for 15 years and never had to leave a JS.

Sometimes. I’ve had to do this a few times.
Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.
This won’t do anything except reduce the amount of ballast that you need. This won’t reduce the cabin weight as the crew bags are already included in the bow.
Also not a possibility in the SkyWest CRJ w/b program.
Yes, it’s a possibility.

So far, I have never had to leave a jumpseater behind except in extreme cases (for example weight restricted and bumped 20 passengers, and take 0 cargo).

So what I’m picking up on it’s the Skywest weight and balance program and not necessarily the plane? Any other -200 carrier do this? I bumped up on the max landing weight issue a number of times, but never needed ballast. Never!

Most operators of the 200 have added a 100 pound plate to the tail cone that all but eliminates this issue. Skywest has not.

Hmm ok I get it. Thanks word

This is frustrating as hell. I jumped through my own hoop on numerous occasions to get JSers on the deuce but at SKW sometimes (often at some outstations at certain times of the year) it simply cannot be done.

There's no installed tail ballast.

In the old days, with paper manifests, you had the width of a pencil lead to work with.

But with ACARS you simply cannot manipulate numbers that don't work.

BTW, if you really want to blame someone, rather than OO pilots who are almost certainly trying their best to get you on, blame Jonathon Ornstien. Mesa went cheap on MX, and grossly overloaded a 1900 back in 2003... the resulting smoking hole caused the FAA to change pax weights by a large margin. Many commuter planes were designed based on the old weights, so suddenly they were all weight limited and out of CG. One type I flew went from being a 30 seat plane to a 28 seat plane overnight.

Where I fly the 200 we need ballast on occasion with a JS and a light load of cargo, but nowhere near the extent that OO does to get a JS on. The 2 coffee makers and the galley configuration are different than where I work.

APC White Knight defender of OO to the rescue. If this was an industry wide 200 issue, I'd agree. The facts are, the OO CR2 jumpseat is less useful than any other 200 operator, and that's where the issue is.

Last time I did an observation in the deuce, the crew had to request adding 400# of ballast to make it work. It was full in the back, and VFR wx both locations, 1.5 hr flight.

We have more of them than anyone else. Your blanket statements are just simply your own very narrow experience. Again most operators have installed a plate in the tail cone, we have not.

Yes, but the issue is not with the pilots.

If you don't like the fact that the OO planes are configured differently, please cancel your JS agreement with them.

In 11 years with the company I think I left 3 JSer's behind and it was always for the same reasons: alternate fuel requirements making us so heavy that we couldn't carry the required ballast. I'd drop the fuel all the way down to MINTO and it would require ballast, putting us overweight. Hated to do it, but they were always understanding when I explained the situation. I wish I could say the same for the crews that left me behind over the years that took a glance at the release and said "Sorry, we'll be overweight," without ever running the numbers. Oh well... that's what I get for commuting.

That isn't the point. The point is that people here are insinuating that OO crews aren't doing everything they have at their disposal to get JS'ers on.

I was there 11 years and had virtually the same record, 2 that I can remember. Hated getting stuck in that infinite loop where you'd solve the CG issue but then it'd put you overweight, re-solve weight, then back outta CG. Grrrr. Once in a great while it just wouldn't work.

I have have a problem since winter weights hit. I have noticed a trend on the EV tail numbers. If you look it is a -44.5 and we are over weight with a foward cg. Inless there is a kid. I got bumped ATL to GNV on company metal on two flights. The captains and I tried everything to make it work.