Wizz Air near miss shows why you aren’t allowed to move seats before take off ….

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• Andrew says:

  18 Oct18 October 08:41

  I’ve been given an operational upgrade to Club Europe before on a quiet flight for this very reason – equally you can’t have everyone sat down the back and no one at the front.

  • VinZ says:

    18 Oct18 October 12:36

    Same here! I was given an upgrade to Biz once because that cabin was completely empty. I was the only one… it was nice 🙂

• Blaster491 says:

  18 Oct18 October 09:11

  Standard accident/incident/observation “swiss cheese”. I’m hugely surprised that the cabin crew did not pick up on the fact the back of the aircraft was literally empty.

  • Nick_C says:

    18 Oct18 October 10:23

    Perhaps that says something about the quality of the cabin crew on that airline.

    I hope it wouldn’t have happened on BA, but who knows.

    • Koment says:

      18 Oct18 October 10:54

      That’s a very generalised statement, I have never had an issue with the ‘quality’ of the Wizz Air cabin crew.

      Having said that, both BA Mixed Fleet and Wizz Air cc are in the same boat – underpaid and overworked.

      • Blaster491 says:

        18 Oct18 October 14:49

        You can be as underpaid and overworked as you like but when it’s your little pink body that will be in the wreckage too a certain level of due diligence is required.

    • Craig Vassie says:

      18 Oct18 October 13:12

      Unfortunately BA’s reliance on inexperienced “kids” in mixed fleet says it’s more likely to happen than you think. Far too many “legacy” pursers with years and years of experience have been forced out by a hostile management.

• Tom says:

  18 Oct18 October 09:22

  On my BA flight last week over 50% of the passengers were in business and I suspect that is not uncommon at the moment.

  So I expect many planes are heavier towards the front.

  • Chrisasaurus says:

    18 Oct18 October 11:26

    Well, no – that’s the point of the article, they’ll get the plane in trim by putting more luggage/freight toward the rear, where possible and move people if not.

• Peter Taysum says:

  18 Oct18 October 09:24

  I’m such a geek. Knowing that no one was hurt I really enjoyed reading this article; thank you.

  • Chrisasaurus says:

    18 Oct18 October 11:27

    I read about it the other day but at the time the AAIB wasn’t naming the airline – do we know if that’s typical?I get the Budapest references rather gave the game away here, but that’s not always enough

    • Nick says:

      18 Oct18 October 16:41

      Yes it’s completely typical, the AAIB by default doesn’t name airlines. It’s to encourage an open and full reporting and learning process/culture, not finding blame.

• Andrew says:

  18 Oct18 October 10:31

  This issue is of particular importance at LCY where there is much less margin for error.

  • Nick_C says:

    18 Oct18 October 10:49

    And yet on BA1, most passengers chose to sit at the front and the rear rows were empty. The last flight I did, 14 pax were in rows 1 to 4, two of us in row 5, and the rest empty.

    • Nick says:

      18 Oct18 October 10:56

      The collective weight of 14 passengers is much lower than the collective weight of 100 passengers. For an aircraft that is always lightly loaded (32 max of 120 theoretical capacity of an A318) but with a heavy fixed infrastructure (heavy seats) it’s going to be less of an issue. As an aircraft type change is never possible, the flight computer will always know the seating plan. If it ever looked like not trimming it would correct it.

      • Julian says:

        18 Oct18 October 12:35

        I’m generally far more interested to read this kind of article than yet another promo to apply for a credit card during the latest offer period.

        Although having said that the one for the Amex Preferred Gold card with 6 months to spend the £3,000 and 22,000 points on offer rather than the usual 12,000 was useful, although still looks like I’m going to have to put a few hundred pounds of credit with my energy supplier who take Amex for one off payments but not automated recurrent billing (which is direct debit only). In normal times I always spend at least £1,000 per month on cards so tells you how much lifestyles are changed at the moment when I’m only spending £300 to £400 per month.

        Re aircraft load distribution the vast majority of neurotypical family group types don’t self reseat and only the odd single passenger getting on last and faced with sitting in a full row up with others may do so. So the only real actual danger is as per here where the airline wrongly distributes the passenger load leaving many rows at the back empty.

        But the cabin crew absolutely should have spotted this lack of passengers in the rear (if they had been trained properly to monitor passenger load distribution before takeoff) so its perhaps no surprise that the airline to which this happened was Wizz Air……………….

        • Rob says:

          18 Oct18 October 13:25

          I recommend you read Simple Flying then Julian 🙂

        • Julian says:

          18 Oct18 October 13:44

          I learned indirectly via visiting there just now (where there was a mention of Air Belgium that I didn’t even know existed) that the magnificently named SABENA (Such A Bloody Experience Never Again as one of my father’s Dutch sugar industry colleagues and I believe many other people referred to it as) has gone and been replaced by the much duller Brussels Airlines as well as there also now being an Air Belgium.

          Anyway re your articles Rob many of them about aircraft cabins and service and destinations served and aircraft types involved are fascinating but one or two of those promoting the credit card or airline loyalty schemes do tend to come in to the Retread Category, although I understand why this happens from a commercial point of view……….

        • RussellH says:

          18 Oct18 October 13:54

          Re pax not re-seating themselves…

          I am an infrequent flyer and would agree that there has not been much, if any evidence of this on BA or LH.

          But I vidly remember a Monarch flight from Paphos to MAN when, as soon as the fasten Seat belt sign went off, half the cabin seemed to erupt from their seats and move to somewhere else. And the cabin crew seemed to be expecting this too. This on an old widebody plane, 767 perhaps?

      • Bagginsurrey says:

        18 Oct18 October 12:57

        As a child, when I first flew, I was terrified to even recline my seat or use the loo in case the plane tipped. I mentioned this to an ex-airline work colleague who’s husband was a ‘Red Cap’ (dispatcher) and it was then she told me how passenger loading did make a difference. So glad I didn’t have a pee on the Dan Dare Comet. Her husband regularly had to go on overseas trips with Heads of Government and Royalty as he was the only one who could still work out loadings with a pencil and paper.

        • Peter K says:

          18 Oct18 October 13:36

          Good old first principles. I’ve been to places where I’ve had to cobble up basic equipment that was missing from what else is available because I learned what they really were, not just how to use them.
          Likewise a crucial bit of basic knowledge at the right time is vital as compared to leaving it to automation (as shown by the 737 Max fiasco I suppose).

  • Alex W says:

    19 Oct19 October 16:41

    @Peter K the problem with the 737 MAX was the “basic knowledge” needed without the automated MCAS required the pilots to have simulator training which would have cost Boeing millions. They covered up the issue and it ended up costing them billions!

• Doc says:

  18 Oct18 October 10:55

  Glad nobody was injured. This kind of thing has happened before such as the Air Midwest 5481 crash where abnormal loading and weight calculation (along with an maintenance issue) caused the aircraft to crash.
  I remember seeing a video a while ago where there was only a single passenger onboard an US commuter flight and it showed the loaders putting extra sandbags to balance the weight. Fascinating subject that most passengers are probably not even aware of.

  • Julian says:

    18 Oct18 October 12:39

    Once travelled on an Iberia flight (narrow body 150 seater effort but can’t remember the plane now) from LHR to BCN (en route to PMI) on a late Easter Saturday afternoon in the early 1990s where there were only four passengers on board. Of course it probably didn’t matter where the four passengers sat in those circumstances and only where the commercial freight was located.

    No wonder Iberia lost so much money back in those pre IAG merger days…………………….

• LEWIS says:

  18 Oct18 October 12:54

  This incident seems to have nothing to do with passengers not being in their allocated seats. In fact if passengers had move from their allocated seat the this event may never have happened.

  • Julian says:

    18 Oct18 October 13:01

    Yes in this case the incident is clealry down to passengers being allocated to the wrong seats for the replacement aircraft type by the airline. As the newly created empty seats were all in the back of the plane unsurprisingly nobody nobody reallocated themselves there of their own accord.

    But the other side of the coin would be a large stag or hen party group travelling on an airline with unallocated seating and perhaps originally checking in separately as a number of groups all reallocating themselves to sit together in some previously expected to be empty area of the plane.

    Either way cabin crew should be monitoring this stuff but in this case they clearly failed to do so……….

• cinereus says:

  18 Oct18 October 14:18

  That’s insane. Any cabin crew of pilot should be well aware of COG considerations.

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