AT76, Dublin Ireland, 2015

AT76, Dublin Ireland, 2015

Summary

On 23 July 2015, an ATR72-600 crew suspected their aircraft was unduly tail heavy in flight. After the flight they found that all passenger baggage had been loaded in the aft hold whereas the loadsheet indicated that it was all in the forward hold. The Investigation found that the person responsible for hold loading as specified had failed do so and that this failure had not been detected by the supervising Dispatcher who had certified the loadsheet presented to the aircraft Captain. Similar loading errors, albeit all corrected prior to flight, were found by the Operator to be not uncommon.

Description

On 23 July 2015, an ATR 72-600 (EI-FAVH) being operated by Stobart Air for an Aer Lingus Regional scheduled passenger flight from Dublin to Rennes was found after flight to have been mis-loaded to the extent that it had operated in a condition significantly outside its permitted flight envelope for all phases of flight despite the fact that the certified and accepted load and trim sheet showed the aircraft to have been within those limits.

Investigation

An Investigation was carried out by the Irish AAIU. It was based on interviews and written reports from the Captain and ground crew involved in the handling of the aircraft departure from Dublin.

It was noted that the 40 year-old aircraft Captain had 6,523 hours total flying experience which included 2,882 hours on the ATR42/72 and that the First Officer had approximately 3,000 hours total flying experience, all but 200 hours on the ATR 42/72.

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