The trailer thing is sorta exactly why I'm uncomfortable with it.
I have a truck which a few times a year I tow various trailers/etc with. Yes the truck was "designed" for this, but that doesn't mean its not eating in safety margins in many ways and is fundamentally far more dangerous for a laundry list of reasons over simply driving the truck around.
The asymmetry of something that large is going to create a lot of complications that this article is glossing over with "trimming", starting with weight/balance issues (which presumably end up being a case that the opposing wing tanks need to be unbalanced/over full, and managed by the crew, etc), and unusual airframe/control surface stresses that eat into the engineering margins.
So, it wouldn't be noteworthy except for the fact that they were also flying 350+ passengers at the same time. Many airline accidents are cases of confounding variables strung together. You can be assured that had anything unusual happened on that fight, that the NTSB report would have started with "The airplane was flying massively out of trim"
I have a truck which a few times a year I tow various trailers/etc with. Yes the truck was "designed" for this, but that doesn't mean its not eating in safety margins in many ways and is fundamentally far more dangerous for a laundry list of reasons over simply driving the truck around.
The asymmetry of something that large is going to create a lot of complications that this article is glossing over with "trimming", starting with weight/balance issues (which presumably end up being a case that the opposing wing tanks need to be unbalanced/over full, and managed by the crew, etc), and unusual airframe/control surface stresses that eat into the engineering margins.
So, it wouldn't be noteworthy except for the fact that they were also flying 350+ passengers at the same time. Many airline accidents are cases of confounding variables strung together. You can be assured that had anything unusual happened on that fight, that the NTSB report would have started with "The airplane was flying massively out of trim"