Have you weighed your 180?

Colt, I bet you can already answer your own question about FR providing a weight & balance sheet. Three little words; "avoidance of liability". You can't give someone a tool (W&B sheet, schematic, or hydraulic jack) and tell them to have at it, at least not without either assuring folks are trained in the proper use of the tool or have waived any claim to damages from improper use. It doesn't help them sell more trailers and it could cost them a bunch of legal fees, so why do it? Sigh...

I knew I'd get a response on that one.

It doesn't work the way you suggest in practice, or maybe in a way it does. In manufacturing companies I've worked for there are always staff engineers who could easily write the instructions so that was budgeted, but not staff attorneys who could vet them and write the disclaimers. That would have cost additional unbudgeted $$. So documents requiring legal review and input never happened unless they were essential for sales of the products.  And specific materials were always discouraged due to the risk that they would not be maintained properly and result negligence claims.

In aviation, W&B worksheets are essential to keep the pilot and their passengers alive, so they are done as a matter of course. The customers are pilots who have been trained in the use of these materials and tested and licensed by the FAA certifying that they know how to do so. Not so with RV owners, the vast majority of whom wouldn't have the faintest idea what a W&B sheet was for. 

Going back to Colt's original comment, my point is that just because the FR engineers have a W&B spreadsheet that they use when designing their trailers doesn't mean that that can be provided for external use by customers without a substantial outlay of additional engineering and legal resources. And to what end? A W&B sheet is not either expected by trailer customers or customary in the RV industry. Better not to do it at all, as I'm quite certain both their head of engineering and their chief counsel would advise. 

Like most non-engineers, you are underestimating what would be required to do the job of properly releasing a W&B worksheet in a way that doesn't put the company at risk. The FAA's handbook for aeronautical engineers on W&B is 114 pages. The airman's knowledge handbook that all pilots are trained and tested on has a half dozen pages on the topic, and in pilot training you spend a whole 2 hour session on it usually. A typical POH (pilot's operating handbook) for a small aircraft devotes 10-12 pages to the topic. Trailers would likely be more complicated, because the loading scenarios for a trailer are a lot more complicated than for a small airplane. The safe operating envelopes are a lot more complex too, because there is a second vehicle involved. 

So, you can call a trailer manufacturing company not wanting to incur all that cost "cheap" but why would it when no one expects it to do so? If the company just provided anyone who asked their engineering W&B worksheet, without all the training and accompanying documentation, change control procedures whenever the design of each trailer changed, etc, someone would misuse the tool, a death or injury would occur, and the company would be subject to a lawsuit. 

Is a lawsuit justified in that case? I think almost certainly yes, because surely the company has a duty to try to assure that the parties that it gave access to the tool were capable of using it properly. That's relatively easy when its a trained in-house engineer who has a supervisor and there are review and test procedures for every new trailer design. Not so for the general public. Its more like giving a chain saw to a 10 year old, pointing him at a tree and saying have at it. But that's just my observation, now we are in your area of expertise, not mine, so I will be interested in your thoughts on that. 

 

Maybe we should emerge from retirement and seek out plaintiffs who have gone off the road from not having their trailer loading right. You can litigate and I'll be your expert witness. I only want $500 per hour

But I think you've hit the proverbial nail on the head. Most of the time, the zen approach to trailer w&b works just fine, and ppl don't die. Lots of pilots use the zen approach too, but the difference is that generally you don't die if you mess up your trailer W&B. It has happened though, no doubt. So it will come back to what is reasonable and customary in the industry, right? If you screw up your zen in the trailer that's on you at this point, there is no case law putting it on the manufacturer (until you get your specialized practice going and call me as a witness anyway). 

If you screw it up in your airplane, that's on you too, unless Cessna screwed it up, and they didn't, and besides, you were trained, and Cessna knows you were trained. If FR published a w&b worksheet and screwed it up, or didn't make sure you knew how to use it, they have now changed what is reasonable and customary in the industry, right? Not to mention creating a reason for ppl to be afraid to buy trailers....Not in their best interest.....