Welcome to the June 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

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Aircraft Weight and Balance

Huh? Did you sign up for the wrong newsletter? Nope -- this really is on the subject of the web and websites, although it may be a little more circuitous than usual. Bear with me, however, because there is an interesting story here.

One component of a website, as you know, is the content, and one of the services I often provide as your friendly web developer is writing or editing (or both) the text within a website we are building. Sometimes I take it one step further and write material for something other than a website. Therefore, it wasn't that unusual to get an email from a friend asking if I could write an article for his magazine. There was one catch -- he needed it outlined, researched, and written in 2 weeks, but since he knew I often write under a time constraint, he figured I could handle it.

The magazine is called Aviation Consumer and it is the rough equivalent of Consumer Reports for General Aviation, right down to not accepting advertising. It's pretty well-known within the aviation world, but since it's hard to get the general public excited about complex devices that do things they never need to do, that's pretty much as far as it goes. Incidentally, for you non-pilots out there, General Aviation is all aviation operations that aren't airline, charter, or military, and while it mostly includes light aircraft, it also includes larger aircraft -- including a few big Boeings.

The writing assignment was to write about a new device -- and website (see, I told you we'd make the connection!) -- for calculating an airplane's weight and balance. Weight and balance is an extremely important piece of data to a pilot, because an improperly loaded aircraft will at very least be hard to fly, and may very well be impossible to fly. Or to put it bluntly, if you load your aircraft incorrectly, it may crash despite your best efforts.

And proper loading is not always straightforward and obvious. There are several aircraft that will be out of their weight and balance limits with two heavy people and full fuel on board, but if you add 100 pounds to the baggage compartment, you will be back within limits. The other part of the assignment was to go through the list of popular single-engine aircraft types and identify the areas of each weight-and-balance envelope that could prove hazardous to a careless pilot.

OK, enough about airplanes, where does the web come in? Well, if you go to the website of the maker of this device (American Aeronautics, http://www.flyincg.com), you will find a very neat demonstration of the web version of their weight-and-balance calculator at http://www.flyincg.com/ifly.htm. The demo is programmed in Java, so to use it Java has to be enabled on your browser. All the user has to do is enter the weight for each seat occupant (how the pilot gets each passenger's real weight is not part of the instructions...). The website immediately shows the effect of adding each passenger on the weight and balance chart. Next, the user can enter the planned fuel quantity and see the effects of that also. It's very easy to see what you need to do to fly that airplane with that load safely (or, if it cannot be done, it shows that also).

There is also an excellent tutorial (at http://www.flyincg.com/demo.htm) that shows how to use the plotter-and-graph paper version of their product, using a Flash sequence that literally leads you through the manual process of graphical calculation. This is a wonderful demonstration of how to use the web to teach something that could otherwise be quite confusing. And by teaching it so well, it counteracts the "That's too hard to figure out" sales objection before it appears.

Suffice it to say that both the web and plotter-and-graph paper methods demonstrated on this website are much simpler and more accurate than the procedures pilots have been taught for years, and the ability to convey that clearly is a big selling point.

No, I did not do this website -- I wish I had because it's a great idea. My point in bringing it to your attention is to point out an excellent example of the direction the web is going -- as a tool to demonstrate, teach, familiarize, and sell, rather than to simply show-and-tell. If you've got a product that would sell better if your potential customers knew how to use it (and knew how easy it is to use), then we'd like to build a website for you like the one we showed you today.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110