A loadsheet balances to the kilogram, because where the weight sits decides whether the aircraft can rotate. The container that comes off stand 4 weighs twenty three kilos more than the sum of the bags in it, and twenty three kilos is what a bag is allowed to be.
I am a load controller for a handling agent and I have done it for sixteen years.
What the job actually is, because the films get it wrong.
You start from the dry operating weight of that specific aircraft, which is a measured figure held in a file. You add the crew, the fuel, the passengers by count at a standard weight or an actual weight, and the baggage and freight by hold. Then you work out the centre of gravity as a percentage of the wing chord and check it sits inside an envelope drawn on a chart. Then you sign it, and the captain signs it, and it is a legal document.
The bags go in containers, which we call cans. Each can has its own tare weight stamped on it, and the tare changes when it gets repaired, and the repair is stamped on it too.
At this airport the bags are weighed individually at check-in, so the system knows what every bag weighs to a tenth of a kilo. And because we do a lot of part-charter work we also put every loaded can on a platform scale in the baggage hall before it goes out to the aircraft, which most places do not bother with.
So for every can there are two numbers: what the bags inside it add up to, and what the scale says it weighs.
They agree. All day, every day, off every stand, to within a kilo, which is what you get from a platform scale with a forklift bumping it.
The cans that go to stand 4 come out twenty three kilos heavy.
Not roughly. I have four years of it in a spreadsheet because the scale logs to a file and nobody ever looks at the file.
Twenty two point six is the mean. The spread is under a kilo, which is tighter than the scale's own repeatability has any right to be.
It is every can for a stand 4 departure. Two cans, both heavy. Three cans, all three.
What has been checked, and the company paid for the first half of it because a scale that lies costs money.
The scale. Calibrated with test weights every six months and twice out of cycle at my asking. It reads true with half a tonne of certified iron on it.
The cans. I have taken the tare weight off the plate and weighed the empty can on the same scale, eleven different cans, and every one of them is within four kilos of its plate, which is normal for a can that has had a door replaced.
The bags. With a colleague, twice, on a quiet Tuesday, we opened a heavy can on the hall floor and weighed every bag in it one at a time on a parcel scale.
The bags added up to what the system said the bags added up to.
We put them back in, shut the door, and put the can on the platform scale.
Twenty three over.
We did that again in 2023 with a supervisor watching, because I wanted it on somebody else's shift report and not just mine.
Same.
Empty can on the scale: right. Bags out on the floor: right. Bags in and the door shut: twenty three over.
The extra weight is only there when it is closed.
What I do with it.
I load the aircraft by the loadsheet, which uses the system's bag weights, because that is the figure the procedure specifies and because it is the figure the other end will work from.
That means stand 4 departures fly about twenty three kilos heavier than the paperwork says, and the size of that is the point. An adult is more. A sixty kilo luggage discrepancy is reported and investigated and twenty three is inside every tolerance in the manual, and the centre of gravity shift from it, with the can in hold 3, is four hundredths of a percent.
I checked that on the chart. It is the first thing I checked.
The airline's own fuel data agrees with me, which is the part that has stopped me raising it again. Their post flight analysis flags an out of trim burn on those rotations and attributes it to a weight error of about twenty five kilos, and somebody in an office has written that our bag weighing needs auditing.
It was audited. In 2022. The auditor found our procedure compliant and our scale accurate.
The one thing I have changed is where it goes.
Hold 3 is under the cabin, aft of the wing. Hold 1 is forward, ahead of it, and for a can of that weight either is inside the envelope and forward is slightly better for trim on a short sector, so nobody has ever queried it.
I put it forward because hold 3 is under rows nineteen to twenty six, and in October I worked a stand 4 departure where the dispatcher came back down the steps to ask me whether the hold was secure, because a passenger in row twenty two had asked the crew twice about a noise underneath her, and I had closed that hold myself, and I went back up into it with a torch on the stand with the engines off.
The can was there. The bags were in it. Everything was strapped and the net was tight.
The scale had said twenty three over that morning and I had loaded it anyway, and I stood in a hold on my own for about a minute working out which of the things I know is the one I am wrong about.