I ran into a situation today while preparing for landing where I exceeded the maximum landing weight… I didn’t even notice it at first during my checks because the calculator simply reset the landing weight to the maximum allowed value. I thought the system used to flag this—for instance, if you selected “Brake LOW” instead of the required “Brake MED” and the landing distance wasn’t sufficient, it would show an alert. I find the current behavior questionable: the actual value is ignored and silently capped at the maximum limit without anything turning red.
Hello,
So what you are finding is how the landing weight field in the performance tool is bounded. If you enter a weight above the aircraft’ts MLW, the field constrains the value back down to the MLW rather than accepting it. Because the value is then within limits, nothing turns red.
The alert you are thinking of, in sufficient landing distance for the selected brake setting, or tailwind component, those are performance limit checks and those still behave as before. MLW is a structural limit and is enforced by capping the value which is why it reacts differently and does not warn you.
I agree that silently capping in this way can hide an over MLW situation.
I’ll raise this with the SimBrief team.
In the meantime, the most reliable area to check this is the flight plan itself, the weights section shows your planned landing weight against the maximum. SimBrief will normally reduce payload automatically to maintain or to keep below MLW. If you ever see the landing weigh exactly at the max, thats the sign it was limited.
Thanks!
It would be helpful if exceeding the MLW triggered a notification instead of simply resetting the entered weight back to the MLW limit.
A sort of plausibility check.
There are situations—where even SimBrief can’t help you beforehand—that result in exceeding your MLW; for instance, if you have to land due to an emergency, or if you get a “Direct To” (DCT) clearance that saves so much fuel that you end up above the MLW.
With the A320, this happens quite easily—you might even take off above MLW, and depending on the distance and payload, you’re in a real bind if ATC decides to “do you a favor” (and you don’t decline it).
I’m ok with the release not accepting it. In real life, an airline dispatcher would not be able to give you a release with a weight that exceeds MLW. This problem arises when you are very close to the landing weight limit on the planned release.
In real life depending on the airline you work for, most airlines will give you the ACTUAL weights AFTER you close the aircraft door. You still had a release before (like the one simbrief creates) that you use for your planning purposes, but when you get your ACTUAL weights via either ACARS or on your Ipad and you load those values to your FMS, you can end up HEAVIER than planned on the release. And this is when this overweight for landing situation happens in real life.
Airlines in their releases should give you this information and you as a pilot should always look for it. Now if that information is not in the release, then it is a problem. Simbrief should give this information one way or another, depending on the airline template that you are using.
My complain and the reason I’m here in this forum today is that American Airlines in their real life release, will give you this information in their first couple of pages of the release (The TPS or Takeoff Performance Section) so that you can be more aware of this and play with the fuel burn enroute if necessary or simply return to the gate and kick off some passengers, so you don’t end up landing overweight and getting in troubles. But the Performance section in the Simbrief AAL template is not the same as in real life. So I can’t find it. In the Real template if the takeoff weight is limited by your landing weight, it will tell you something like: MTOW 155.8L. Meaning that your max weight for takeoff is 155.8, and the L means that its because of your landing weight. So if you are about to takeoff and your current weight is lets say 157.0 pounds, and you decide to takeoff, then, if you actually burn your planned fuel burn, you will land approximately 1,200 pounds Overweight. Which means you are going to get in a lot of troubles.
Can we fix the performance section of the AAL template?