Deadweight

• An oppressive burden or difficulty.
• The unrelieved weight of a heavy, motionless mass.
• Deadweight tonnage is an expression of a ship's carrying capacity, including the weight of the crew, passengers, cargo, fuel, ballast, drinking water and stores
• The extra weight on a machine part that lowers its performance when not in use. For example, the main engine on a rocket becomes dead weight when the propellant is used up. For this reason, multi-stages rockets eject engines after they have been utilised to reduce the dead weight. However, the later stages of the rocket are initially deadweight in the early stages of launch.ater, and stores.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esm4s9iK_Gs

Click link to see video.( The one we saw in class)

I think the plane crash was due to the fact that the plane was overloaded. The crew estimated the the mass of each passenger and added the total mass of the luggages/bags and concluded that the total mass of the load had not reached its capacity. Unfortunately, his estimated mass of each passenher was lesser than the actual mass, plus,the crew's calculation of the total mass of the bags/luggages was not accurate. Hence, the plane was flying at a abnormal angle as back of the plane,which contains all the bags/luggages, was too heavy and became unbalanced. The pilot tried to bring the nose of the plane lower but to no avail. The plane eventually crash and exploded because of ignited full tank fuel in the plane.