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Pakistan airline admits taking extra passengers in aisle
- nautical 10y agoThe flight in question went from Karachi to Medina carrying a total of 416 passengers, on a Boeing 777 with a total seating capacity of 409, including staff seats. !!
- nautical 10y agoWere the passengers standing while taking off ?
- dingaling 10y agoAll passengers were seated, airline non-revs were on portable jump-seats. Per Captain's discretion. Maximum certificated escape capacity for a 777-300ER is 550.
- wwice 10y agoYes. Here's what Pakistan daily Dawn has to say "As many as seven passengers aboard the Pakistan International Airlines flight PK-743 (Karachi-Madina) on Jan 20 were forced to stand throughout the over three-hour flight after the airline boarded excess passengers in a serious breach of air safety regulations." https://www.dawn.com/news/1316682/pia-probing-safety-breach-after-seven-passengers-forced-to-stand-during-flight https://www.dawn.com/news/1316682/pia-probing-safety-breach-...
- jwilk 10y agoDid they also stand during takeoff and landing? Doesn't sound believable...
- nautical 10y agoSorry but I don't understand the down vote , I was trying to understand the situation ?
- kakarot 10y agoPeople downvote over some dumb stuff sometimes on HN, but I'd be careful about posting a complaint about being downvoted that contains no other contents. It's against site rules and could get you in trouble.
- jwilk 10y agoThe downvoters were annoyed by bad punctuation. ;-P Don't put spaces before commas or question marks. Single question mark is enough. "??" looks sloppy.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> Don't put spaces before commas or question marks. Actually, I do this all the time, when what precedes the punctuation mark is a URL. It just doesn't seem right to have the URL seamlessly run into a punctuation mark that isn't actually part of it.
- jwilk 10y agoYeah, I sometimes do it too, even though it doesn't look pretty. Another possibility is to put <> around the URL; but that didn't work correctly on HN last time I tried.
- FabHK 10y agoURL a permissible exception to a rule that otherwise stands. You can identify texts written by French people by the extra spaces (if they're careful or have a good word processor, it'll even be a non-breaking space). PS: Spaces before smileys also permissible :-)
- jlgaddis 10y agoYou asked a question that is easily answered by RTFA -- in the first sentence even!
- nautical 10y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20140802021208/http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/startup/pdf/777_perf.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140802021208/http://www.boeing...
- ahussain 10y agoI'm curious, on a scale of 1-10 how big of a transgression do people consider this to be? When I was in India it was common to have people sitting in the aisles on long distance buses, trains, and theatre halls where fire evacuation plans were clearly not being followed. Agreed, planes are not theatre halls, but how severe of a breach in public safety is this? I think planes are a special case because they are such fragile systems, but it does seem like in the West we worship health and safety a little too much.
- spuz 10y agoI'm from the UK and I'd put it at 4 or 5. Basically completely unacceptable but when it comes to health and safety there is almost no limit to how dangerous you can make a situation. 10 would be depressurising the cabin and giving passengers warm clothes and oxygen masks and hoping enough of them survive that you still make a profit.
- ajdlinux 10y agoIn commercial aviation specifically, we worship health and safety even more than usual, in large part due to the high psychological impact of aircraft incidents. Given the complexity of aviation systems and the number of catastrophic failure modes that exist, the fatality rate of (particularly Western) aviation is absolutely incredible.
- 4ad 10y agoI would give this incident 1/10. It's mind boggling to me why people think this is a big deal. Speaking of theatres and other venues, overcrowding them is way worse. For once, they actually do catch on fire much more often then planes fall from the sky. I consider overcrowding a theatre criminal negligence, while I couldn't care less about (minimally!!) overcrowding a plane.
- quirkafleeg 10y agoAs it says in the article: Such an over-crowded flight would have caused problems in an emergency evacuation, aviation experts said, and passengers would not have had access to oxygen if it was suddenly required. Additionally, you don't wear a seatbelt on a plane to save you from a crash, you wear it to stop yourself being injured during turbulence, or from injuring someone else by being thrown onto them. Obviously these people did not have seatbelts.
- jstanley 10y agoWhat's the problem? I'm sure those passengers would rather stand in the aisle and get there on time than sit at the airport waiting for the next plane...
- superplussed 10y agoIf the pilot doesn't know he has extra passengers, and those extra passengers add weight to the aircraft, and the aircraft is not fueled to handle the extra weight, that's a problem.
- audeyisaacs 10y agoAll passengers are required to have a chair for safety reasons. The chairs absorb a lot of impact in the case of a crash, and obviously they also have seatbelts which are important for safety.
- 4ad 10y agoFuck somebody else's safety guidelines. I am responsible for determining what level of safety I desire for myself. Nobody is forcing me to stay there, I decide (or not) if the flight conditions are acceptable or not.
- ajdlinux 10y agoGood for you. I'd rather not have to try and climb over your dead body when I'm evacuating.
- 4ad 10y agoThen chose a different (more expensive) airline that doesn't take extra people. Market dynamics at work. Personally I would always chose the more expensive option, not because of safety (level of safety is plenty), but because of comfort. Thing is, I afford this comfort, there was a time (not even that long ago) where I could not afford to fly at all, and I would have definitely accepted to stay in the aisle (or a plane without seats). Many, many people are in this scenario. Why shouldn't they be allowed to fly if they are satisfied with the conditions?
- tim333 10y agoI had that years ago (~1983) on a flight in China on CAAC. They put a couple of regular plastic chairs in the isle. CAAC didn't have the best safety record at the time.
- robtaylor 10y agoRecord is 1,122 passengers on a 747 to Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon however that was extraordinary circumstances.
- ijafri 10y agosomething that's being ignored, there are three possibilities, and its' never PIA that it will prefer it let alone advertise aisle... It's about 2.30 hr flight from Karachi to Medina. 1. They are labors. and they can't miss the working day, they beg to fly in aisle 2. 99.9% is above, other than some religious pilgrims, who have tight schedule ... 3. PIA is dirt cheap for Karachi to Medina compared to ahem Emirates And it wasn't as uncommon than one could think, until recent times, few decades ago, it was pretty regular thing for Karachi to Lahore (local flight ... 1 hr approx) ... as people have to meet certain time to perform a job .... and back then there were no local carrier compared to dozen of them now, and about 20+ KHI to LHE daily flights. It's terrible, but chalking it up entirely to PIA is bit unfair...
- jessaustin 10y agoThanks for making the connection. If these were Pakistani laborers, everyone's Westernized weight estimate of 100kg/person is about 50% too high.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- OliverJones 10y agoYears ago I had a conversation with a Pan Am flight attendant who worked a Teheran evacuation flight after the Pahlavi "dynasty" was deposed and the US nationals had to clear out of Iran quickly. She told me they filled their Boeing 747's aisles with people sitting on the floor. She told me it's a calculated risk to put passengers in the aisles. But, the captain of the flight knew exactly what was going on and made the decision to proceed. It sounds like this PIA flight crew concealed their overloading from the captain. THAT is a very serious infraction indeed.
- tyingq 10y agoAside from the other concerns raised that I see here, weight/balance would be off if the passenger count was off. The pilots use weight/balance to calculate things like range, takeoff speed, altitude ceiling, stall characteristics, and so forth. If the plane is heavier than they think, that's not good.
- throwanem 10y agoThree quarters of a ton isn't all that significant a weight bump or CG change for an aircraft that size - the latter could as easily happen just from people moving normally around the cabin, maybe queuing at a lav, and the former might fractionally increase Vr but otherwise wouldn't make any difference. Filling the aisles with people would be a more significant concern, but as another commenter noted, it's a calculated risk - better a long takeoff and rollout than leaving probably one or two hundred people to the tender mercies of the revolutionary and explicitly anti-Western new regime. In either case, severe turbulence is a much more critical problem. If it happens, some people are certainly going to be badly, maybe lethally, injured.
- tyingq 10y agoIt isn't the most important thing thing no. Keep in mind though, that the pax count doesn't drive just body weight, there's luggage as well. And I don't know that the count was off by just 7 or 8 pax.
- alexvoda 10y agoIt perplexes me that there are HN'ers who do not understand the risks involved. I can understand that the passengers involved do not have an alternative that ensures their short term livelihood and may not be aware of the risks. But seeing some of the HN'ers, who one would assume have a high school understanding of physics, have the same careless attitude is surprising.
- rwc 10y agoThey're just hacking rigid and outdated laws about transportation. Pakistan International is the Uber of the skies!
- FabHK 10y agonice one :-)
- alkonaut 10y agoIt makes a very unlikely event (crash) slightly more likely, and it makes the consequences of slightly less rare events (heavy turbulence, diversion, emergency landing...) worse. There is very high chance that it makes no difference to anyone at all. That's why it's seen as a "no big deal". I when something is VERY unlikely making it even ten times more likely doesn't matter to people's perception of risk.
- alexvoda 10y agoIt is hard to say how unlikely it is. A plane crash may be unlikely globally but may be more likely among the planes of an airline that considers this acceptable. Likewise, a drunk driver is more likely to cause an accident than the average driver. And as I was saying, I understand this attitude from the passengers. For them the risk of a crash may be severe but highly unlikely and in comparison to the risk of loosing their job acceptable. But I would have expected the average HN commenter to recognize the just like the risk is different for different types of drivers (and their cars due to maintenance) , the same applies to planes. So those less rare events may be more likely than the average. So making some events (and their consequences), that may already be more likely than the average for them, a number of times more likely is bad. Than again the average is just as uninformative a statistical indicator for HN commenters as it is for drivers and planes. This makes me think, when someone talks about something they perceive as the average of something do they perceive the median, the mode or actually indeed the mean(average)? There is a case to made that we actually perceive the mode (value that appears most often) instead of the mean.
- bane 10y agoI took a flight from Yekaterinburg to Moscow in the 90s, and there was a delay while they added some of the chairs back to the plane because they had been moving some furniture in the cabin. I mean, like dressers and dining room tables and such. heh...Aeroflot
- kylehotchkiss 10y agoAeroflot in the 90s: you sir or madam are a hero for patronizing this airline
- droithomme 10y agoI've been on several overseas flights, including on US based airlines, where people were stuffed in the aisle. It seems to me to be a dangerous practice, but flight safety standards tend to be more lackadaisical outside the US.
- kchoudhu 10y agoWhich US airline? There's a fat old FAA investigation and fine waiting for it when you report them (as you should!).
- droithomme 10y agoOne of them was United. I did in fact report the incident to the FAA. Because the flight started and ended outside the US they had no jurisdiction and rejected my report.
- justin66 10y agoEven if the safety issues surrounding people in the aisle were negligible, there's the Van Halen-M and M factor. If the airline is ignoring this rule, what other rules are they ignoring?
- startupdiscuss 10y agoDon't give them ideas - now they're going to throw out all the green passengers!
- Razengan 10y agoPretty much all transport vehicles in Pakistan do this; taking on more passengers than there are seats.
- kc10 10y agoIsn't the captain responsible for checking the count of people onboard the aircraft before takeoff?
- FabHK 10y agoI had relatives in the airline industry, and the backronym going around for PIA (Pakistan International Airlines), which was quite crash-prone back in the days (30 hull losses, according to Wikipedia) was "Please inform Allah"...