ORIGINAL: Aero65

Hi All

Great explanations here.

I used to do manual weight and balance for a air carrier in the early 90's. We did a load plan before the flight with the known weights of the cargo and est. baggage weights. I tried to get the CG in the aft limit for better fuel burn, which I’m sure the ground crew did not like me for some days as we did re-arrange more than a few cargo pallets and baggage cans some nights.

The B-747-200 can carry a lot of stuff, of course the newer 400 is pretty impressive compared.

I wish I had a picture of the wheel computer that we used to calculate the balance it was a plastic wheel with a paper background that showed aircraft zones that you marked off moved the wheel, then arrived at the cg. Got pretty exciting some nights as the darn bag numbers changed right till departure and they wanted us to load the plane to the last Kilo. If i remember correctly the max takeoff weight for our birds was 371,945 KG which is 838,364.03 Lbs. Pretty crazy considering that at that weight you could loose one engine on takeoff (after V1) and still take off amazing....