Did you hear the one about the sports team?

Most of us have had a chortle about this one, but for those who missed out, here’s a quick catch‑up.

When people are checked in to fly, they are put into one of 4 categories, so that a relatively accurate average weight can be used for them, for the Loadsheet weight calculations. These are Male, Female, Sports, and Child. Many airlines use the same weight for men and women. The child is obviously lighter, and the sports weight is for those big fellas that weigh more than average. Like me.

Anyway, that sports entry is usually used for teams, because the added weight for 20-odd guys can make quite a difference.

On this occasion, the sports team (it was a major international rugby squad) was checked in simply as male, so was somewhat under what they should have been, weight-wise. The mistake was not picked up till the Loadsheet operator was about to close the flight. Everybody was onboard, and the flight was almost ready to leave for Australia.

To make the change, the sports pax needed to be offloaded in the system, and checked in again with the correct code. Because they had already been boarded in the system, they needed to be deboarded in the system before the Loadsheet officer could quickly offload and recheck them in, before finalising the Loadsheet. Remember that these are things that are done in the system. Usually the punters do not need to know if we have made a fox pax.

Our system requires that boarding and deboarding can only be done by the gates sets that are assigned for boarding. So the call was made to the gate agent. “Can you please deboard the XXX sports team, so that I can recheck them in as a sports team?”

Did our fresh-faced young possum deboard them all in the system as asked? Not so much. After a few minutes we hear “OK I have deboarded them. They are all standing with me on the airbridge.”

Oh dear! 

What was he thinking? Is the aircraft sitting on a big-arsed set of scales, and we need to get the guys off so that we can re-weigh the aircraft? Who knows?

Anyway, coming back to the comment about the journey of the ice.

What if we DID have a big-arsed set of scales for the aircraft to sit on? How cool would that be? Here’s an experiment to try.

• Fill up a jumbo with everything required for a 15hr flight.
• Fill it up with pax and crew.
• Tow the aircraft onto these aforementioned big-arsed scales.
• Sit there for 15 hours, and do everything you would do for the flight. Meals. Drinks. Movies. Toilets. Everything.
• Except run the engines, of course.
• Then monitor the weight of the aircraft throughout the “journey”

I wonder if the journey of the food and drinks from the galley at the beginning of the flight to the waste tanks at the end of the flight, will affect the total weight much.

Just a thought.