Yet another example of a great crew in action

Yes, that title is sarcasm. This crew should, at the very least, have their licenses revoked and never fly a commercial aircraft again.

A BH Air A320 landed in Verona, where 77 passengers disembarked. The remaining 87 passengers, going on to Rome were allowed to remain seated where they were. This put 58 in the aft cabin, 25 in the center cabin, and 4 in the front cabin. According to the weight and balance, they should have redistributed the passengers to 29 in the center and 29 in the aft.

During takeoff they began to rotate at only 30 knots. The aircraft suffered repeated tail strikes during the takeoff, as well as a stall warning. The crew requested to continue the flight to Rome at 10,000 feet, and only elected to return to Verona after a pressurization warning sounded. They asked to return but didn't inform ATC as top why.

Analysis by Airbus shows that the aircraft CG was out of limits at takeoff, being 43.75% of mean aerodynamic chord.

www.flightglobal.com...

a reply to: Zaphod58

Don't warning alarms sound about Center of Gravity some time prior to rotation and climb out?

I don't know of any that have a CG warning built in but they do have a guideline as to seating with different numbers of passengers that they should have been paying attention to.

It reminds be of an old saying (that proved false in this case thank goodness) that goes "A nose heavy plane flies poorly, a tail heavy plane flies once.

a reply to: Flipper35

The best warning system on the aircraft is called weight and balance. The ground crew claims they gave them the paperwork saying they needed to move people and it was signed but never happened.

I'm willing to bet they cracked the aft bulkhead if they got a pressure warning.

Holy cow! talk about Get-home-itis. I don't know what kind of undertrained pilot ignores weight and balance. I can't count how many lives have been lost to this, and this crew just didn't care.

Why didn't he abort the takeoff? Geez, he could have killed all those passengers. Then, after luckily getting airborne, decides to attempt to make that leg of his itinerary.

This was not a CRM problem, but a bad leadership/decision making episode for this captain.

May he never fly again.

That was not even get home it is, if crews remember to double check wt and balance coming back from the desert there is no excuse for this.

Jesus I would of lost my # with an early rotation, and at that low of a speed there is no explanation for continuing other than incompetence.

ETA: if I had been a passenger, as a crew member... way to many planes have gone down due to wt and balance failures, this is one area you never ever ever short cut.

a reply to: cosmania

Yes, it's on the Captain, but the FO could and should have spoken up. The Captain wasn't alone in that cockpit. The FO did exactly nothing, and even agreed with continuing.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Zaph,

Yeah, I agree. Seems like we need to start retraining the "assertiveness" part of CRM and show the Tenerife disaster over and over. The holes in the swiss cheese of this accident are numerous. I could use this to teach many accident investigators.

Failures are abounding in this.
Lack of communication: Pilot to the crew to reposition passengers
Lack of Training: allowing non-standard and/or confusing language to increase doubt
Failure to follow standards: Captain not completing an accurate and updated Wt and balance calculation
Lack of assertiveness: CoPilot not asking for that info
Confirmation bias: Pilot believing that he's done this before, and he should be well within limits with this load.
Failure to follow standards: Pilot continuing a takeoff when an error occured at 30 KIAS.
Lack of assertiveness: CoPilot for not calling for aborted takeoff
Casual disregard for general safety: Pilot for not immediately looking to RTB for an aircraft that is not performing in a typical manner

I would do a thorough review of the hiring and training practices of my airline to understand how this much of a pervasive lack of safety could occur.

Nutso.

You're absolutely right, this is a textbook case of how to cause an accident; they seemingly really, really wanted an accident to happen, since they worked so hard and single mindedly at it.

Fortunately, there were enough performance margins built into the aircraft to overcome their best efforts at self destruction.

As an aerospace engineer and private pilot, it has occurred to me that if there were load cells on each landing gear strut or if you could simply read out the hydraulic pressure inside each strut you would have all the data required to automatically and continuously calculate the center of mass of the aircraft as it sits on the tarmac. This could be compared to the allowable CM with a simple calculation to trigger a warning condition alarm.

I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if modern transport aircraft already have that data somewhere in their computers.

reply to: cosmania

a reply to: Zaphod58

I was thinking electronic warnings like pressure sensors on the gear. "Warning, nose gear light - Move people" type thing. I know they do the weight and balance calculations and I was responding to intrptr about the electronic warnings in the cockpit prior to rotation.

a reply to: Flipper35

By the time you're getting an electronic warning, it's usually too late and you're already nose high and about to stall. I know what you were referring to, but the best warning is always going to be the weight and balance.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I agree.