# Preface Aircraft Weighing

Every airplane type has a different weight.
Early heavier-than-air machines weighed just a few hundred pounds. In the early days of ultralights, the general agreement among enthusiasts was that the maximum empty weight of an ultralight was to be 150 pounds.
A Cessna Turbo Skylane's "typically equipped empty weight"--no fuel, no payload--is 2082 lbs; Takeoff weight--the maximum this plane can weigh in flight--is 3100 lbs. They figure that by the time you do all your checks and taxi out to the runway, you'll have burned off a couple gallons of fuel.

A Boeing 737-800 has a maximum takeoff weight of 187,700lbs. They don't give the typically equipped empty weight on those because no two of those planes are alike. If ABC Air offers "all business class service" and DEF Air offers "great rates to vacation destinations" because the whole plane is coach class using smaller seats and more of them, ABC Air's planes and DEF Air's planes will have different weights...and if GHI Air is a cargo carrier who has no seats on his plane at all, their planes will weigh something radically different from the first two airlines' jets.
Get ready for takeoff!