Does anyone have a good rule of thumb for calculating the weight or number of pallets to alot for passenger baggage on the 744. When planning a long trip with a full passenger load, I am trying to figure out how many pallets are realistically required for baggage, since I don't want to load any more pallets than necessary. Andrew

The PMDG Load Manager reveals the secrets. I used the tri-class config.The load manager assumes 82KG per passenger. So clicking random I got Pax Weight of 20907 which gives me 255 pax on board by dividing.Then I would take the average baggage allowance of your favourite carrier. In the example of Virgin Atlantic you can have 96KG and the PMDG lets you have 10 First Class pax, the rest can have 64KG and theres a max of 415 of them. Just from eyeballing that you can see that the average is going to be the economy baggage, so 64KG.So in my example above you had 255 pax * 64KG (assuming they bought as much as they can, a good assumption with todays passengers ;)) which gives you 16320KG for bags. Each cargo pallet takes up 1588KG, so doing the maths gives you 11 pallets (rounding up big time) for all those bags.Obviously a real life loadsheet would be a lot more accurate than this (I hope!!) but its a good rough way of working out what the bags take up.HTH,

I have no idea what real world procedure is but assuming the maximum allowance is 25KG (multiply by 2.2 for lbs!) then you could work on that figure. Most pax would be under that but some would have additional baggage.Any dispatchers amongst us may be able to offer a more enlightened view?