Aircraft Weight Question

A 200 King Air with full fuel can typically carry 800 pounds
of pilots, passengers and baggage. That's is why the
certified the 300 and now the 350 King Air, to get full
fuel and all the seats and baggage legally.

Airplanes get weight added, often for little good reason.
More entertainment radios, extra plush seats, a potty or
coffee bar. Then they get dirty, dented and pilots wonder
why they don't fly so well.

In Alaska, the regulations allow legal flight at up to 10%
over certified gross weight under some conditions.
Elsewhere, many pilots just fill the seats and tanks and go.
Sometimes they don't go far.

Fuel management and calculating the trade-offs between
necessary range and payload is part of "big" airplane
flying. As for commercial operations, the FAR requires that
the airplane be re-weighed every 3 years if I remember
correctly. Factories weigh a sample number of airplanes and
thus some airplanes have never been weighed.



--
James H. Macklin
ATP,CFI,A&P

wrote in message
...
| I've noticed that new souped up Mooney has almost no
useful load with
| full fuel. (Less than 1 big pilot)
|
| It strikes me that there are two limits to gross weight in
a single.
| The structural and climb performnace limits and the
statutory limit that a single engine
| stall speed must be less than 61K( I think this number is
right)
|
| So this makes me think that the new souped up mooney is
probably flown over gross
| on the asumption that the only real limit here is the
artifical statutory limit.
| This would make me feel very uncomfortable. If you
routinely fly at over gross weight
| you never know close you are to the real structural
limits.
|
|
| I grew up in Alaska and a lot of the bush planes are
routinely flown
| well over gross.... both knowingly by the pilots and via
fudged paperwork.
| I've was personally involved with reweighing a Beaver
DHC-2 where the official
| paperwork had the empty weight suspiciously low. The last
weighting paperwork accounted for
| Full Fuel, and when we weighed it it was heaver than it
should be by this amount.
| I suspect that the previouse weighing had the tanks empty
and accounted for full.
| A lot of the forrest service contracts in South East
Alaska had contact limits that said
| the aircraft provided must have XX useful low. These
numbers were unreasonably low for
| most of the specified aircraft models, encopuraging the
operators to cheat or go out of business.
|
|
|
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