Fish Story

Air Afrique was an airline operated jointly by several central western African nations, all of whom were originally French colonies: Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, the Ivory Coast, maybe some others, I don’t remember anymore and the airline doesn’t exist anymore. But it did in 1990 when, as a brand new and very junior American Trans Air L-1011 copilot, I was assigned to go to Paris for a month and fly for them between Paris and Africa. That came about because Air Afrique had badly damaged one of its DC-10s and had contracted with American Trans Air (now ATA Airlines) to do a year long “wet lease”: provide a crewed airplane to substitute for Air Afrique’s grounded aircraft. And that was how I found myself in Dakar, Senegal, in the cockpit of an American Trans Air L-1011 with “Air Afrique” painted on the side, trying desperately to get all my preflight duties done before our scheduled departure back to Paris.

Copilots typically have to do all the drudge work prior to departure, partially because, as they say in the military, “Rank has its privileges,” and partially for a better reason, which is that the captain is always distracted with a million little questions and problems prior to departure and most of the drudge work just wouldn’t get done otherwise. But it often leaves a very busy and sometimes frustrated copilot trying to get all the “boxes” loaded (the navigation units and performance computers), the takeoff data computed, and, the bane of all copilots, the weight-and-balance form completed.

The weight-and-balance computation is critical to flight safety because an overweight aircraft won’t perform as expected, and an out of balance aircraft can become uncontrollable. Think of a canoe: The more weight you put in it the harder it is to paddle and may eventually sink. Put all the weight in the front or back and it will take on water and become uncontrollable. Verifying that the aircraft is loaded within its weight limits and that that weight is properly distributed is part of the copilot’s job prior to every flight: The copilot takes the data that the ground agent has collected, data on passengers, bags and cargo, adds the weight of the fuel, looks up a bunch of numbers on various charts, adds them all up, checks them against the limits, signs off on the form and hands it to the captain who checks it and signs off on it, taking responsibility for its correctness. What makes all of this really hard for the copilot is that a lot of the data—the final passenger count and the final bag count—doesn’t get to him (or her) until the last minute. Then, with everybody on board and everything loaded and ready to go, everyone waits and watches while the copilot looks up, enters, adds, checks, and finally finishes the form so the captain can check and sign it.

On this particular day I knew we were going to be close to full with a heavy fuel load to get us non-stop to Paris, and even without the final numbers I knew we were going to be close to the maximum allowable takeoff weight, which I had computed separately based on runway length, elevation, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and wind. So when one of the Air Afrique ground handlers came on board and said he wanted to put 10,000 pounds of fish in C1, the forward cargo bin, I looked at my partially completed form and said, “No, we can’t do it, not in C1, not in C2, not in C3, we’re already close to max gross and there’s no way we can take 10,000 pounds of fish.” (He actually gave me the weight in kilos, an additional complication, but a kilo is 2.2 pounds, so that was pretty easy to convert.) He said, “But this is very special fish, all on ice, it’s going to some of the best restaurants in Paris,” which I could believe because Dakar is right on the ocean and I had seen some incredible displays of fish in the outdoor markets and had eaten some fabulous fish dishes in the hotel’s restaurant. I said, “I’m sorry but there’s just no way we can take 10,000 pounds of cargo.” “He said, “But then the fish will all go bad. We will have to throw it all out.” I said, “Well then, you’ll have to take 10,000 pounds of something else off, and it can’t be fuel, it will have to be bags or people.” He said, “We can’t do that. We will have to leave the fish.” I said, “I’m sorry, that’s the way it is,” and he left.

I got my final numbers, lots of people, lots of bags, lots of fuel, no fish. I finished the form, gave it to the captain, he quickly checked it, signed it, and all the paperwork “went out the door”—we were on our way. It was my turn to fly, the captain having flown it down from Paris the night before. The takeoff roll seemed normal until I went to rotate. Rotation begins by bringing the control column back, which forces the nose to go up, the tail to go down, the wing to start developing lift, and the airplane to takeoff.

An important part of the weight-and-balance computation is the takeoff trim setting, which varies depending on how the airplane is loaded. The takeoff trim setting, a number, is set on the trim wheel by rotating it until that number is aligned with an index pointer. Then it is checked prior to takeoff as a part of the pre-takeoff checklist. The purpose of the takeoff trim setting is to provide a given degree of back pressure on the control column when rotating. Consistency of pressure results in consistency of rotation which is important to achieve the takeoff performance expected: Too slow a rotation results in a longer takeoff roll and less clearance over obstacles, and too rapid a rotation increases drag, delaying lift off, and in a worst case scenario, can cause a tail strike, damaging the aircraft. In this case when I tried to ease the control column back, the force required was much higher than I expected—I almost needed two hands, and the rotation was slow. The captain looked over at me, he knew I was a brand new copilot, and I’m sure he was thinking, “What have I got here? Can’t even do a decent takeoff,” but I got it to rotate and fly, retrimmed to relieve the back pressure, and sat there trying to figure out what was going on. I must have figured the trim setting wrong, I thought. I would have five or six hours to try to find my mistake once we got to cruise altitude, so I tried to put it out of my mind until then.

That’s when the second strange thing happened: We couldn’t get to our assigned altitude, barely climbing 100 feet per minute the last 1000 feet, versus 300 to 400 feet per minute that would be normal for our weight and outside temperature. We knew we were heavy, and weights are always estimated in scheduled service, never exact, since they are based on average passenger and bag weights, and it is not at all unusual to be heavier than estimated, but not usually by so much that you have trouble making your flight planned altitude. We got to altitude, eventually, and with nothing much to do for several hours I got my copy of the weight-and-balance form out and went over it, trying to find my error. I checked all the weights, all the moments—the balance part—checked the arithmetic, with a calculator, twice, and couldn’t find any errors. The captain checked it, the flight engineer checked it, and they couldn’t find any errors either. So I checked the flight log, and after a couple of waypoints points it was clear that we were burning fuel faster than expected. Not seriously so, just a little bit more each segment, but at the current trend we were going to land with several thousands pounds less in reserve fuel than we had planned for. The weather was good in Paris, traffic was expected to be light, Charles De Gaulle has several very long runways with precision approaches in both directions, so all the things you want extra fuel for—vectors for traffic, holding, missed approaches—weren’t factors, but still, we were burning more fuel than we should have. Extra weight equals extra fuel burned: It takes energy to lift and carry that weight—nothing is free in aviation. Everything was beginning to look like we had not just a little more weight than estimated, but a lot more, and that it was toward the front, probably in C1.

We eventually got to Paris without further incident, although with quite a bit less fuel remaining than planned, and as I went about packing up my stuff and cleaning up the cockpit, the captain went back to say goodbye to the passengers and the flight engineer went outside to do a post flight walk around. When he came back in he had a funny smile on his face. He said, “You won’t believe what I saw in C1. Must be 10,000 pounds of fish, on ice.”

Made me wonder what happened to the DC-10.