Currently on the tarmac waiting for my flights to tax out from the gate. The stewards have called out three times “while this flight is not full, please stay in the seat allocated on your boarding card to make sure we have the right weight distribution during takeoff”. Can really one or two passengers moving change the weight distribution on a 50 000 kg airplane (250M 🦅-units) enough to have an impact?
Or is this just BS? As a frequent traveler I hear this argument a lot..
In: Engineering
At takeoff, the plane is at maximum weight for the trip. The fuel tanks are full and they have to worry about front/back weight balance as well as side to side. Later, the plane has burned off a lot of fuel. (It burns about 7,000 pounds an hour.) so it is lighter and they can adjust balance by choosing which tanks to pull from.
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