Here’s a time capsule. I wrote this in 2011, before flying – along with everything else – felt like it was getting more dangerous. One thing I definitely don’t think we will ever experience again is the joy of flying on a mostly empty plane.
It’s not every day that a flight is delayed because there are too few people on board. But, blame Will and Kate, Brits just weren’t flying out of London last Friday. As a result, the Virgin Atlantic A340-600 called Ladybird was carrying only 112 of her usual 380 passengers.
So before we could take off, we had to play a little game of musical chairs. This was done to balance out the plane. Rows 37-40 were blocked off so no one could sit in them. A lady from a middle section was asked to move next to me over on the right side of the plane, and similar reconfigurations took place all over economy. (A flight attendant confirmed my suspicion that no Upper Class passengers were made to move from their pods.) Everyone was free to prowl around the cabin and claim the empty rows once we reached cruising altitude, but the seat distribution had to be exact for takeoff and landing.
The culprit? Turbulence. At cruising altitude, it’s no big deal: Planes can withstand rollercoaster altitude drops that leave their passengers banged up and surfing a sea of vomit. But at takeoff and landing, an unbalanced plane makes things dicey. It’s easier to navigate an empty or even an overweight plane through liftoff turbulence than to do the same for a sparsely populated plane.
To balance the plane, the crew tries to distribute the weight of the passengers, so that the plane’s center of gravity is proper. Recently this practice led to a dustup when an overweight passenger was asked to move to the back of the plane to balance the load.