Holds for this trip
What Is Going in the Hold
Seats are the limit people think about. Baggage is the limit that stops trips, because a hold has a shape as well as a size and neither can be argued with on the ramp.
- What the answer is
- How many pieces are going, roughly what they weigh, and whether anything is unusual in shape.
- How long it stays true
- Until the packing changes, which is usually until the day before.
- What happens when it stops being true
- The aircraft offered may no longer be able to take it, and on a small aircraft that is not a detail. Weight and balance is a calculation, not a preference.
Three questions, not one
How many. A count of pieces that have to go in.
Roughly how heavy. Not to the pound. Charter aircraft are weight limited in a way airliners are not, and the smaller the aircraft the more that matters. An operator would rather have a rough honest figure than a precise wrong one.
Anything an odd shape. Skis, a bicycle, an instrument, a box that does not bend. These are not more luggage, they are a different question, because a hold door has a size and things either pass through it or do not.
Why it stops trips
Because it is discovered late. Everybody knows how many people are coming, weeks ahead. Almost nobody counts the bags until the night before, and the answer that comes back sometimes does not fit the aircraft that was booked around the seat count.
At that point the choices are a different aircraft, a second trip for the bags, or something left behind, and all three are worse than one sentence in the original request.
Why the desk asks even when it seems obvious
Because it costs a caller ten seconds and it is the single most common reason a charter goes wrong at the ramp. An operator can answer instantly if asked, and cannot answer at all if the question never reaches it.
What the desk does with the answer
Writes it down as given, in words where words are clearer than numbers, and passes it on unedited. It does not round anybody's count down to make a trip easier to place.
Answers that hold for this trip, one of three shelf lives in what a quote rests on