Alaska Air Ground Stop

So there I was… doing manual weight and balance at delta for YEARS during training and recurrent… in case the system went down.

The system went down… turned out… ONLY the pilots were trained! Ha! System ground to a halt for a day or something. Manual weight and balance no longer taught at training and recurrent, yay!

Hilarious.
 
Makes sense; shouldn’t take that long to roll back, and check.
 
Reading the article it states the ground stop only lasted approximately an hour this morning.
Well that's good news.
Given how well Alaska Airlines 737 doors work, and how well their W&B computers work, I'm not really eager to find out how well their refund policy works.
 
Doubt their refund policy will blow off the side if the aircraft…
 
So there I was… doing manual weight and balance at delta for YEARS during training and recurrent… in case the system went down.

The system went down… turned out… ONLY the pilots were trained! Ha! System ground to a halt for a day or something. Manual weight and balance no longer taught at training and recurrent, yay!

Hilarious.
When I started flying the KC-135 we didn't have computerized takeoff data. Everything was manually done chasing spaghetti charts. You'd calculate it the day before using the forecast weather, then update it if needed the day of. The kicker was if before takeoff, the temperature, pressure altitude, winds, or aircraft weight changed from planned (there were parameters like +/- 5C, etc.), the data had to be recomputed. There were many a days sitting, holding short of the runway when I had the performance manual open on my lap running charts. It's a miracle we didn't run off the end of the runway trying to get to an erroneous S1 that I had calculated.

We would have to run the takeoff data for our checkrides and the tolerances were pretty tight (+/- 2 kts), and if you computed Vrot and you were 3 knots off from the "approved solution," that was a bust. Gotta love SAC.

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Takeoff data in 21 easy steps!
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Six page spaghetti chart. And this wasn't even the worst one.
 
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