Souls On Board

March 10, 2026

Just before we push from the gate, a suite of weight-and-balance data is beamed to us. The message is delivered through a communications platform called ACARS. The info is then entered (some we type in manually, some of it uploads automatically) into the flight management system to help us compute our takeoff speeds, flap and trim settings, and whatnot.

The message includes a tally of the plane’s occupants, or “souls on board,” as we call it. This includes everyone: passengers, crew, and lap children. I normally jot this number down on my cheat-sheet. In the event of an emergency, controllers will ask for it to assist with fire and rescue planning.

The other night, departing for Paris, as the message unspooled from the ship’s printer, something caught my eye. The SOB total read 301. This was the first time in my career that I’d pilot a plane carrying three hundred or more people.

With every seat taken and a full complement of crew, our jet doesn’t quite hold that many. It was the lap kids, bless their boisterous hearts, that tipped us over the edge.

No shortage of pilots out there fly planes with room for well over three-hundred, or even four-hundred passengers (some of Emirates’ high-density A380s carry over six-hundred). What such a number means for them, if anything, I can’t say. But for me it felt important. Not for bragging rights, but as a personal point of pride. It was, in a way, a redemption.

My flying career, beleaguered and busted-up as it was at times, had been building to this moment. For decades it had been a struggle. Bankruptcies, furloughs, bounced paychecks. Crappy jobs with crappy airlines flying crappy planes. Now here I was, about to take a widebody jet across the ocean with three-hundred people on it (or souls, if you’d rather, making it sound more lofty).

Pilots measure their progress by different milestones. First solo (I barely remember), first upgrade to captain (it happened in 1991). This seemed, well, heavier.

It took a long damn time, but things had finally paid off. And there was the number that, to me, best quantified it: 301.

I was going to include a photo of the printout with the total circled… until I realized I’d lost it.

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Photo by Alex Shuper, courtesy of Unsplash.