Narrative:

I was operating as first officer and pilot monitoring on our flight. Upon arriving at the aircraft we noticed that the flight attendant jump seat was meled. We reviewed the MEL which included reviewing a page from aom 1 which outlined the procedure for running the weight and balance app with an meled flight attendant jump seat. We followed the procedure and selected 'deferred' under flight attendant on the weight and balance app. We were then confused as to how we should count the flight attendant in zone a. We ran the app with the flight attendant counted in zone a which put our souls on board count to one more than it actually was. This lead us to believe that that weight and balance app had already accounted for the flight attendant sitting in seat 1A since the app is supposed to reflect meled items. We then ran the app without her listed and this gave us an accurate souls on board count. I am confident that we ran this procedure correctly. This report is being filed because I personally found the MEL procedure confusing. I did not feel as though the procedure outlined in the aom 1 weight and balance section for this situation did a good job explaining the procedure. If a crew was not paying attention to the souls on board it would be easy to miss this detail. The procedure in aom 1 merely states to select 'deferred' however it should also specify whether the flight attendant should be counted in the zone a passenger count. The captain and I discussed all of these points; ran the app; and continued the flight without delay. The plane was operated well within limits for the flight.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: EMB-145 First Officer reported confusion over Flight Attendant jumpseat MEL procedures.

Narrative: I was operating as First Officer and Pilot Monitoring on our flight. Upon arriving at the aircraft we noticed that the flight attendant jump seat was MELed. We reviewed the MEL which included reviewing a page from AOM 1 which outlined the procedure for running the weight and balance app with an MELed Flight Attendant jump seat. We followed the procedure and selected 'deferred' under Flight Attendant on the weight and balance app. We were then confused as to how we should count the Flight Attendant in zone A. We ran the app with the Flight Attendant counted in zone A which put our souls on board count to one more than it actually was. This lead us to believe that that weight and balance app had already accounted for the Flight Attendant sitting in seat 1A since the app is supposed to reflect MELed items. We then ran the app without her listed and this gave us an accurate souls on board count. I am confident that we ran this procedure correctly. This report is being filed because I personally found the MEL procedure confusing. I did not feel as though the procedure outlined in the AOM 1 weight and balance section for this situation did a good job explaining the procedure. If a crew was not paying attention to the souls on board it would be easy to miss this detail. The procedure in AOM 1 merely states to select 'deferred' however it should also specify whether the Flight Attendant should be counted in the zone A passenger count. The Captain and I discussed all of these points; ran the app; and continued the flight without delay. The plane was operated well within limits for the flight.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.