Pakistan airline admits taking extra passengers in aisle

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39081476

by rishabhd • 9 years ago

96 93 9 years ago

nautical5• 9 years ago

The 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. !!

nautical5• 9 years ago

Were the passengers standing while taking off ?

dingaling• 9 years ago

All 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• 9 years ago

Yes. 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-...

nautical5• 9 years ago

Sorry but I don't understand the down vote , I was trying to understand the situation ?

nautical5• 9 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20140802021208/http://www.boeing...

jwilk4• 9 years ago

↑ Performance summaries of (some?) 777 models.

Not sure how's that relevant to this article, though...

nautical5• 9 years ago

Specifies passenger and cargo limits

ahussain• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

In 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.

4ad2• 9 years ago

I 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.

quirkafleeg2• 9 years ago

As 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.

roywiggins• 9 years ago

Don't need to fall from the sky to cause damage. Bad turbulence can break bones, doubly so if you're stranded in the aisle with nothing to hold you down. Airplanes have seatbelts for a reason.

robotresearcher• 9 years ago

It takes one sky-bump to throw every single one of those people against the ceiling head-first. This happens once in a while.

An Air Canada flight in 2015 had 21 people injured, including a broken pelvis.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tsb-investigation-air-...

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

If they break this rule and get away with it what other rules are they breaking? How many others will start breaking rules?

jakobegger• 9 years ago

I don't think it's a big deal.

mtkd• 9 years ago

in a post on Quora about what it's like to fly on Air Force One:

First, as we started to descend I instinctively went back to my seat and buckled up. But I noticed a lot of the other "frequent flyers" were still up and walking around. So I asked one of them, "When are we supposed to sit down?" They just kind of laughed at my "noob question" and said something to the effect of-- "You don't really have to sit down at all just watch how the pilot lands this thing." So people were still up and walking around as the plane landed. For someone who had only flown commercial it was a fascinating to me for some reason. Sure enough- the pilot put her down like a feather and came to a gentle stop.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-fly-on-Air-Force-One/...

FabHK12• 9 years ago

CFR 14 (Federal Aviation Regulations) requires everyone on board a civil aircraft to wear seat belts during taxi, takeoff, and landing.

(Under part 91.107 [1], where part 91 are general rules for general aviation, and that rule does not hold for operations under part 121 (air carriers/airliners), 125 (planes with more than 20 pax), 135 (commuter and on-demand flights), but they all re-introduce it separately [2][3][4], so yeah.)

Either they're all criminals, or the rules on military flights are different.

At any rate, I'd think it's rather prudent to sit down and put a seatbelt on - the rule's not just for fun, but because accidents can occur. The notion that the Airforce One pilots are somehow special with special landing skills strikes me as fanciful.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.107

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.311

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/125.211

[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/135.128

angry_octet2• 9 years ago

If it was documented policy that the captain could authorise extra passengers and so on, 3/10. But if they just ignored their own rules it's a 9/10, because adherence to procedure is critical to avoiding death. If they can't do that bit right, what other (expensive) corners are they cutting? Engine maintenance? Crew training? Rest time log fabrication? Nepotism?

srssays• 9 years ago

Think you have that the wrong way around! Taking on more passengers than there are seats is not safe. If it's an isolated incident, then that's 3/10. If it's an actual policy of the airline then holy shit! 11/10

certifiedloud• 9 years ago

The other comments don't really take into consideration the possibility of turbulence.

Imagine people trying not to fling around the cabin when hitting a rough patch. This isn't something that happens on a bus, but it is routine in aircraft.

viraptor• 9 years ago

The evacuation risk is only one side of the issue. People not strapped in are another. With enough turbulence, they'll fly around the cabin. In the best case it will be uncomfortable for them. In the worst, a 100kg body will suddenly hit you in the face.

I mean, this can happen on a bus: http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view3/2175405/bus-bounce-o.gif If you experienced proper turbulence in flight, you can imagine how it can go wrong on a plane. So around 8 and I will call the staff if you sit next to me and think you're too cool for the seatbelts.

sandworm101• 9 years ago

Ive seen it in the US several times. Some people just refuse to use seatbelts. They look pretty funny hovering upwards then crashing down onto armrests. Luckily cabins now are so cramped that they rarely move far enough to hurt anyone else.

consto• 9 years ago

When you consider that planes have crashed killing all on board due to overloading, it's actually a pretty big deal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/us/crash-that-killed-21-ap... http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/11... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-32732607 https://sputniknews.com/latam/201612261049016624-plane-brazi... https://generalaviationnews.com/2011/07/18/overweight-airpla... http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2004/Mar-29/29...

Google tells me that the average person weighs 80.7kg, let's conservatively round up to 100kg to take into account clothes, and luggage (It's probably higher). From this we can estimate that the PIA flight had an extra 700kg (It's probably closer to 1 tonne) of weight on board, and extra 700kg that wasn't properly secured or distributed.

Depending on the plane, the effects could range from using up more fuel (planes carry extra fuel for emergencies and so they can circle their destination while they wait to land, it would eat into this reserve making flight incidents more deadly), to failing to take off the runway; The pilot wasn't informed until he was in the air.

While the plane in question is certainly larger and more powerful than the majority of the links I provided, the fact of the matter is an overloaded bus or train may refuse to move if overloaded, a plane can fall from the sky killing people both on-board and on the ground. Planes fail deadly.

You now have 7 extra, fragile humans standing in the aisle who have nowhere to belt down in case of emergency. If the plane crashes, needs to make an emergency landing, or even encounters incredibly rough turbulence they could be thrown around the cabin hurting both themselves and others.

As for a 1 to 10 scale of transgression, it's hard to place because of the nature of such a simplistic scale. Assuming your scale is confined to aeronautics (lest we invoke Godwin's Law) what counts as a 1, and what counts as a 10? If your 1 to 10 scale is truly inclusive of every possible aeronautical incident then 1 has to be a passenger with a typo on their ticket, and 10 has to be 911. I don't know about you, but I have no idea where to place this overloading incident on such a scale.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

Weight is not the problem here.

While the plane in question is certainly larger and more powerful than the majority of the links I provided

At least an order of magnitude more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliners_by_maximum_t...

The smallest 777 can take off weighing over 200t. An extra 0.7t is basically nothing, considering even the smallest variant holds nearly 100t of fuel and consumes over 6t/h of it. In other words, 0.7t is the weight of the fuel consumed in less than 7 minutes of flight.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-a-Boeing-747-or-777...

alkonaut3• 9 years ago

I once flew a (non-indian) airline with a large group of people from india on it (to be honest could have been from some of the neighboring countries too, but looked like the average group of Bangalore engineers) - who stood up and retrieved their coats and carry on from the overhead bins while the plane touched down. A fly around or bumpy landing could really have ruined their day. I was just thinking "that makes sense if you ride on the roof of the bus from the airport home...".

As anecdotal as it gets but still eye opening.

dominotw• 9 years ago

happens on every single indian flight. Indians have the fear of being 'left behind' from decades of conditioning where only first few birds get the worm. I have this instinct too form standing in ration lines with my ration card for wheat/sugar and palm oil .

FabHK12• 9 years ago

Also frequently on flights in/out of China, though the cabin crew are quite happy to shout "Qing zuo" (please sit) during taxi when necessary.

I hate that. Of course, most likely nothing is going to happen, but it could, and then their stupid suitcase could also fall on my head.

When the plane arrives at the gate, there's still plenty of time to get your stuff... :-/

userbinator2• 9 years ago

The 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.

IMHO the weight difference will be negligible, and in an emergency evacuation those in the aisle would be the first to leave. The biggest risks are probably turbulence and availability of oxygen.

dghughes2• 9 years ago

If you take flying lessons weight and balance is a big part of the training.

The moment arm ("virtual" fulcrum) is an imaginary point where the balance of the plane is and it moves depending on the shape of the aircraft and where the weight is located.

Imagine a long lever with the fulcrum in the middle now imagine that lever is flying in three dimensions. Any weight near or far from the fulcrum makes it difficult to control the lever (aircraft) if the weight is moving or in the wrong spot.

My flying lessons were 25 years ago and I didn't continue but that's the gist of it.

FabHK12• 9 years ago

As others have pointed out, this case was almost surely well within the normal range (imagine people going to the toilets), but yes.

FabHK12• 9 years ago

Around 4. A bit like taking a selfie on a train track, or walking along the edge of a sky scraper - most likely nothing is going to happen, but if, the consequences could be severe.

Turbulences injure people all the time, see [1].

Also, commercial aviation is as incredibly safe as it is because everyone follows the rules. If you start neglecting them because everything is happy and dandy nearly always, you are contributing to the next accident.

It is this creeping "normalisation of deviance" that has to be fought.

Note that generally I agree with the notion that we might exaggerate with safety - I'm all for letting children play, for example. But here we are dealing with potentially deadly consequences, and not only for yourself, but for others.

Let me conclude with a great quote:

"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."

— Captain A. G. Lamplugh, British Aviation Insurance Group, London. 1930's

[1] http://avherald.com/h?search_term=turbulence+injures&opt=0&d...

jstanley• 9 years ago

What'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• 9 years ago

If 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• 9 years ago

All 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.

ptaipale• 9 years ago

I would rather sit in my seat with the belt buckled and not have another passenger bounce all over the cabin and hit me in case of turbulence. Not to mention capacity, balance and evacuation efficiency issues.

tim333• 9 years ago

I 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• 9 years ago

Record is 1,122 passengers on a 747 to Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon however that was extraordinary circumstances.

ijafri• 9 years ago

something 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• 9 years ago

Thanks for making the connection. If these were Pakistani laborers, everyone's Westernized weight estimate of 100kg/person is about 50% too high.

OliverJones2• 9 years ago

Years 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.

tyingq2• 9 years ago

Aside 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• 9 years ago

Three 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.

metalon• 9 years ago

In 1991, Israel evacuated 14325 Ethiopian Jews in 36 hours using 35 aircraft, with up to 1122 passengers on a plane [1]. It's such an impressive feat, those must have been some of the best pilots, to be able to fly such an overcrowded plane (even though they stripped the seats from the planes it was probably still overloaded)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon

joecool1029• 9 years ago

Not to knock the accomplishment but to be fair, the passengers were really light (confirmed according to article).

This comment sent me on a journey to find obesity data on Ethiopia and I found this ranked list that tied back to the CIA factbook as source and places them next to last (currently): http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=et&v=2228

OliverJones2• 9 years ago

I've heard that Boeing 747 airplanes have enough lift to fly properly (if not land properly) with their fuselages full of water. They are in service as fuel tankers.

Still, it's a bad idea to prang an airplane with a few hundred people in the aisles, so pilot skill is important.

alexvoda3• 9 years ago

It 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• 9 years ago

They're just hacking rigid and outdated laws about transportation. Pakistan International is the Uber of the skies!

FabHK12• 9 years ago

nice one :-)

alkonaut3• 9 years ago

It 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.

alexvoda3• 9 years ago

It 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.

mozumder• 9 years ago

It perplexes me that there are HN'ers who do not understand the risks involved.

I don't think you understand that "risk" doesn't mean "damage"?

alexvoda3• 9 years ago

Of course it doesn't. Risk (of an event) is an aggregate of the severity (of said event) and the probability (of that event happening). The damage is just the severity.

It is actually irrelevant in this case how risk is actually calculated from these two because almost no one actually calculates it before a plane ride. (Though it is probably calculated for heads of state/royalty/CEOs/etc..)

bane• 9 years ago

I 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

kylehotchkiss2• 9 years ago

Aeroflot in the 90s: you sir or madam are a hero for patronizing this airline

droithomme2• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

Which US airline? There's a fat old FAA investigation and fine waiting for it when you report them (as you should!).

droithomme2• 9 years ago

One 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• 9 years ago

Even 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• 9 years ago

Don't give them ideas - now they're going to throw out all the green passengers!

Razengan• 9 years ago

Pretty much all transport vehicles in Pakistan do this; taking on more passengers than there are seats.

kc10• 9 years ago

Isn't the captain responsible for checking the count of people onboard the aircraft before takeoff?

FabHK12• 9 years ago

I 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"...

Pakistan airline admits taking extra passengers in aisle

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