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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Weight and balance isn't simply a matter of add up the weight of all cargo on paper. You need to load the plane in a reasonably laid out way and the whole result dictates how you take off. Being wrong or winging it could easily mean a catastrophic failure when trying to take off.

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Weight and balance calculations are something that anyone in aviation will wind up memorizing early in their career. You don't "need" bespoke software for it. You don't need software at all. It just makes it way easier when you have hundreds of individual items.

What's most likely to happen is that they will punch it all into an excel sheet and get their primary objective of weight distribution correct. What will suffer is cargo organization so the crew at the layover is likely to find that they need to unload a bunch of stuff in order to get at some cargo that needs to come off at that stop.

A plane "could" fall out of the sky but that would require multiple people not doing their job but there's no point in pearl clutching over that because even if the software works the same people not doing their job can still cause that outcome.

This vastly understates the seriousness of problems you can run into. It was just last year that all of Alaska Airlines was grounded [0] because of issues with weight and balance. While those takeoffs resulted in tail scrapes, they could've just as easily lead to running out of runway if the bug had been slightly different [1].

[0] https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/aviation/2023/02/20/after-al...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898361

Comments like yours really drive me up the wall. Nobody doubts that a plane needs to be at least somewhat balanced to fly. It also needs fuel. It needs some semblance of a maintenance schedule. It needs many things. Everyone with a brain knows all this. So then what means beyond in-group signaling is served by hand wringing over any one of the dozens of critical links in the chain?

The bug you cite, which you would not likely even know about if not for other commenters, was only caught because people asked for an old school manual calculation. Had the software process been more transparent it perhaps could have been caught earlier.

The fact that someone failed to properly implement the calculation in software does not change the efficacy of doing the calculation manually. Furthermore, the fact that there were people capable of eyeballing the accuracy of the software outputs seems to back up my point that there are tons of people capable of doing these calculations kicking around.

The bug was caught because airplanes had tail strikes. It might help to actually read the article you're commenting on, especially with that high horse.

Like I said, hand wringing about someone's botched software implementation does not change the fact that this is simple math that tons of people at an airline are qualified to perform and check.

This is not rocket surgery. This is something that literally every private pilot with a Cessna does when they encounter a novel loading. Stop making it out to be some super scary thing requiring serious expertise to not screw up.

Why continue to comment without knowing what you're talking about

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