How to Balance & Airplane

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Rodney Fielitz. I'm a certified flight instructor in Cottonwood, AZ, and I'm here to give you the basics of what it takes to become a pilot. Alright, the next thing we have to teach you is weight and balance. Weight and balance has to do with cross-country flying. You might want to go cross-country flying, throw all the kids and the dog and everybody in the airplane--and maybe even some cake for Grandma. But, one of the things you have to learn is how much weight will this airplane take, considering how much fuel you put in there, how much everybody weighs. The airplane can only carry so much weight, and after that, the airplane will not fly. We have a loading graph in this airplane that shows you the different steps for the fuel, the front passengers, the rear passengers and how much weight you can haul. And this is a critical thing, because one of the things with weight and balance is you want to know where the center of gravity is on your airplane. We have what we call a Datum Line. Anything in front of that is forward center of gravity or forward CG--anything aft of that is called Aft CG. There's different characteristics on how you can load an airplane. If you load your airplane with forward CGs, there's different characteristics of what the airplane will do. It's going to take a longer roll down the runway before it climbs, before you can get it off the runway, because you've got the forward weight of the airplane too far forward--and it just doesn't want to climb. And the other one is called Aft CG. And Aft CG is probably the most serious--you do not like to load aircraft aft. There is a couple benefits. You'll get a faster airspeed out of an airplane that is loaded with an aft CG. But the worst thing is you'll have a higher stall speed and you'll have more violent stall characteristics. So again, we teach stalls, but we also want to teach you not to load the aircraft so you get into an Aft CG--or a nasty violent stall characteristic. So, during your practice, we do weight and balances. This is also a pre-requirement for your check ride. You will do your cross country procedures, and you will go out with an examiner and do a cross country. You'll also do a practice weight and balance. And you'll make sure the airplane is inside of its envelope. The envelope is what we call your safe operating. You can fly within the envelope--either the front or the rear being loaded to max. As long as you're in the envelope you can be OK. Doesn't mean you can't go outside of the envelope. I teach my kids this--you can go and do things outside of the envelope, but someday you are going to get caught. And you're going to get in trouble. So we always teach our kids--and our people to fly within the envelope."