How the hell does this happen? Not one of them thought it was weird they were waiting?

[BornSlippie]

38 passengers stood in a stairwell for 40 minutes at Manchester airport this morning. The plane left without them and their baggage was not removed which is a massive safety breach!

Don’t worry though they got a £10 voucher each 🤣 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/the-planes-gone-passengers-left-33257487?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwdGRleAPbir5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeAqOm9yuYVQTfweKxPdgDKwGxdwgjiarz8_vB55gJqJk8HncFATD-xsXorQc_aem_iBTnS8LxhFBb9b_keY9AeA#Echobox=1768825840 if its behinds pay wall (it shouldn’t be) I have another article

As a regular Manchester Airport short haul passenger, to have to wait on stairwells for ages like this isn't usual and there are never any crew around at this point.

I'm amazed the cabin crew didn't notice the missing chunk of passengers though? What happened to the headcount? What a shitshow, I'd be furious.

Presume they'll have to stick them on a flight with BA or Iberia or anyone flying to Alicante today, or nearby and bus them, unless they're lucky enough to have another Jet2 flight going there that isn't too full (unlikely).

They didn’t “fail to pass the boarding desk”.

Not all airlines do a headcount on the plane. 38 empty seats scattered about a plane is not necessarily immediately obvious that something has gone wrong.

What is so difficult to understand?

Nope-a-de-nope on down to airports management.

Its firstly the airline.
"Rush" is another term for not spending the cash needed to have safely loaded the plane

The airline is flying into multiple airports under multiple managment. So their security staff are in the position of looking at a range of weakness which each loading design may throw up by having a control to counteract any flaws.
The airlines secuity function allowed the plane to take off missing "boarded" who had loaded luggage.
The airline allowed a process to evolve which breaks the flow between the gate and the plane. So either there was no control process or the control process failed.

End of day: blaming a "subcontractor" partner should not be any kind of a get out of jail card for the airline.

The Airport and the staff involved dont get a free pass as it should not be possible to "hide" one "boaded" let alone that many.

First question is was the stairwell unsecurable or unsecured?

If it was unsecurable neither the airline nor the airport should have allowed it to be used the way it was.

If it was unsecured then it needs an investigation to find out why and how future security breaches can be prevented.

It wouldn't be 38 random seats though... passengers especially on a holiday airline tend to be in groups. So it would be whole rows empty.

@Fends "I am not understanding your point that a flight with a possible capacity for 300 and generally flying with around 90% full seats, would be alarmingly and obviously missing passengers because 10% of its seats were empty" 🤔

The cabin manager will have been told exactly how many passengers should have boarded based on the number of scanned boarding passes. If the flight was "full" then the number of empty seats should have been noticed. If the flight was "90% full" then it should have been clear that there were 70 empty seats instead of the expected 30 empty seats (on a 300-seat aircraft). The cabin manager is the most experienced cabin crew member and should have enough experience to notice this discrepency and in any case, if the final manifest states "270 passengers" (or whatever) then the cabin manager has to be satisfied that this is the actual number of passengers actually on board.

Modern aircraft also have automatic weighing systems - i.e. the pilot can see the actual weight of the load (passengers plus baggage). If there are 38 passengers missing, then the aircraft will be showing a discrepency of around 3,200kg compared with the expected weight (38 passengers x approx 80kg). Pilots are supposed to check this, usually as a precaution against trying to take off when overweight, but should also query if the system is showing a weight that is far under the expected load weight. Either some of the passengers or luggage is missing, or the system is possibly faulty.

Do you really want to fly on any aircraft on which the crew does not know exactly how many and who is on board?

Honestly,.and you're going to have to trust me on this,.I do know how this works or at least was meant to work at the outfit(s) I worked for...

The basic airside.processes and load/balance paperwork by their nature are all.pretty similar, "manifests" differ.

Edit to add: can.you please name a modern aircraft where there's active weight measuring going on..it's always been just around the corner but never considered reliable enough.

I wish the airlines would stop this nonsense where they hassle everyone through the gate only to stand in the stairwell, waiting to board. More than once I've been waiting while they make the "last call..." announcement and the plane isn't even there to board! I assume its all so that the airline can say everyine "boarded" on time because they had left the gate for airside, and sod the "customers", included elderly, parents with young kids, disabled, who have to stand for half an hour.

Grrr.

We’ve waited 30 minutes in a stairwell before, it was boiling but none of us thought the plane would go without us, you just do as instructed in the airport, I assume both doors were closed.

It's unlikely they'd be randomly scattered though as people travelling together would've been together in the stairwells. So there would be empty rows

I'm not going to disagree with you - I'm just stating my experience, which is different to yours.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not throwing Jet2 under the bus. There would appear to be any number of points at which the process for boarding and dispacthing this particular flight seem to have gone wrong.

Somehow 38 passengers ended up in a stairwell, which might have been the correct stairwell or the wrong one - either way, they should not have been able to get there or if it was the correct stair well, they should not have been abandoned there. Clearly not the fault of Jet2.

My issue with Jet2 is that this flight was a 189-seat aircraft, and if 38 passengers were missing, this should have been noticed by either the cabin manager (empty seats, or even speed of boarding) or the pilot (3,200 kg weight discrepency).

The type of planes Jet2 uses to run this route holds approx. 190 passengers in single cabin compact formation (budget airline style).

So around 1/4th of the planes capacity checked in but was missing, you don't even need to do a head count to notice that a quarter of the plane is empty.

If this had happened on a Ryanair flight, that odious little twat Michael Ryan would probably be invoicing the passengers his firm left behind for the cost of the drinks/snacks they may have consumed on board. I LOATHE Ryanair.

Fair enough, we're in agreement on most of that, the exception being the claim that the pilots should have spotted it.

if the aircraft involved actually had an active weight measuring system and it was in use fair enough. I know such systems have been trialled over the years (especially in the cargo world) supposedly with mixed results...whether they have improved and are used to any or.an increasing degree in the airline world, don't know.

If Jet2 are now using such a system, OK, you have a point,.the 3ish tonnes should have been spotted...

if OTOH it's still being done the traditional way and their crews are still typing into the onboard systems values such as Zero Fuel Weight by hand, using the numbers off the loadsheet, then they won't trap the sort of loading error they had here.

I guess we will have wait and see if more is revealed.

Airlines focused on using staff as revenue generators rather than in a safety and operational focus like they are meant to.

poor flow and lax security it airports. Passengers should not be queueing on stairs for long periods of times it’s extremely unsafe let alone random unmanned stairwells in boarding area. What a joke.

as if ‘subcontractors’ are not subject to the same rules and scrutiny of direct staff.

Been travelling with EasyJet very frequently recently and not once have they checked my boarding pass when I actually got on the plane. They’ve never done this in the many years I have used them. They do, however, always walk down the gangway doing a headcount just before the doors are closed.

Whatever the cause - it's clearly fucking dangerous to have a loophole wherby 'boarded' passengers could hide and not get on the plane and noone notice and the plane take off with their luggage on board. And that's Jet2s problem and Manchester airports problem

40 unexpected empty seats and no one noticed!!!
The plane must have been about 2000 kilos lighter - maybe not much as a % but I thought weight was measured precisely.

Oops! Duplicate post

I don’t get your thread title asking the people to realise. We’ve waited for ages in a stair well for a flight before then got on.

Same

The.weight has been the subject of.previous debate.

Traditionally, generally, there is has been no real time weighing of aircraft going on during loading...the overall weight needs to be known for.performance reasons but is usually derived by summing the measured weight of fuel with the known or assumed weights, as applicable, for things like the hull, cargo, passengers etc...that normally works well enough, but it's true that if passengers numbers are wrong the calculated overall weight is out and the crew may never know.

A previous poster has mentioned some aircraft can weigh themselves....now I know that has been trialled over the years but where that's got to, whether it's now widely in use or used by Jet2, don't know.

If you did have instantaneous measured weight available the underload should have been obvious, but to remphasise there's no info I've seen that it was available here, and if it was not available there's no way for the flight crew to spot the underload.

ETA: an.unknown underload of several tonnes isn"t great but not the end of the world...the bigger problem would be if the missing passengers shifted the aircraft's centre of gravity (balance point) significantly from where it was supposed to be.

What could they have done? There are delays. You can be standing in a stairwell for a while waiting to board. The door is usually shut behind you, and you’re in a queue. If you go back to ask what’s happening, you lose your place. And you often can’t see the door out or see what’s happening outside.

i don’t think it’s fair to blame these people.

Airline is totally at fault though for not taking off the luggage OF 36 PEOPLE. That’s scary.

Flying luggage wiithout the owning passenger is a major security breach and there will surely be an investigation into this. It's hard to see how Jet2 aren't going to be held responsible; whatever else happened they loaded the luggage and didn't load the passengers. Someone's going to be in big trouble.

Because this is what happens at airports, you basically get treat like shit and kept as uninformed as possible because if you dare to air your distaste you are threatened with not being allowed to travel.
Captive audience.

It's not remotely unusual to be left waiting in stairwells at airports for this length of time.

It has happened to us a number of times at the departure gate. You can't go back because the doors will be closed anyway. You can't go forward and out to board the aircraft because the airside doors are also closed and there are no staff with you in said stairwell at that point.

I've not had the experience of the aircraft actually departing and leaving this many passengers behind but I would say that Jet2 must be totally and 100% at fault here. These were checked in passengers whose boarding passes had been scanned at the required intervals throughout the airport and whose baggage had been loaded into the hold.

It's a major security risk carrying baggage without passengers without a special permission or prior arrangement for doing so. It obviously does have to happen occasionally - one of our cases was once left behind at Stansted Airport and had to be flown out to us at our destination on the next available flight to put the error right.

I hope they fully compensate these people.