Air New Zealand now weighing passengers before they board flights | Hacker News Reader

Air New Zealand now weighing passengers before they board flights

cbsnews.com

27 pointslxm20 comments

They're doing a survey according to the article, to use as data for their weight calculations. This can only be seen as a good thing.

Also, I think I've been weighed going on smaller planes, say the float plane from Victoria to Vancouver. Am I remembering wrong?

I'm really not a beliver in "for your safety" as an excuse for anything, but knowing the proper weight and balance of the plane seems trivially justifiable, and completely worth any intrusion that comes with weighing people.

You are not remembering wrong. And problems with weight and balance have contributed significantly to accidents on commercial carriers, even in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481

As recently as February of this year, weight issues made flights tail hit the runway: https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/software...

> a software glitch was responsible for the incident. According to the Seattle Times, the tailstrikes occurred largely as the result of a bug in a program sold by a Swedish firm called DynamicSource. The program is supposed to deliver “crucial weight and balance data” that pilots enter into their flight computers to help determine stuff like “how much thrust the engines will provide and at what speed the jet will be ready to lift off.” In this case, the tool delivered faulty data that “seriously undervalued [the] weights for the airplanes.”

  ...the data [delivered] was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light.

I don't think this bug is something that would have been resolved by weighing passengers or not.

Also a Tu-104 crash with all USSR Pacific Fleet admirals and command on board:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash

> I'm really not a beliver in "for your safety" as an excuse for anything, but knowing the proper weight and balance of the plane seems trivially justifiable, and completely worth any intrusion that comes with weighing people.

There have been multiple sensationalized instances where an overweight passenger has been asked to move, to much outrage and outcry. This prevents that for the price of one-time outrage.

From memory, I believe the standard practice for weight and balance is to use a standard average/median passenger weight, which is proving troublesome in a day and age with rising obesity weights.

This might be the first time it's announced. I haven't flown in a while (even before the pandemic) but a long time ago, I distinctly remember the surface I was standing on along with my luggage, as I was standing for checking in at the service desk, seemed rather like a weigh scale --- the type that's embedded into the floor under a flexible mat. I just thought to myself "makes sense".

It also reminds me of what I once heard from someone in the aviation industry: "The laws of physics don't care about your feelings. If they say the plane is too heavy to fly, it's not going to fly no matter how much you cry."

People are ok with walking through a machine that looks through their clothes and displays an image of their naked body, but the number on the scales is sacred?

Title of the article is quite misleading given that it’s entirely voluntary for the purposes of a survey, feels like that detail was omitted for clickbait purposes.

Yeah 100%. Tldr: weight isn't visible to anyone at the gate and is not associated with a passenger. Article is a nothingburger.

> Participation is entirely voluntary, according to Air New Zealand.

I doubt this will lead to reliable numbers then. Heavier folks will be more likely to feel ashamed (which is unfortunate, but probably true).

I don't see a reason to do a survey at all if participation is voluntary.

Results will be off by 5% or more, simply because heavier people won't volunteer.

And if the airline is fine with the result being wrong by 5% or more, they might as well just taken the average weight of 5 people in the office.

I suspect this is all a charade... Either the goal is to get mentioned in lots of newspapers (free advertising!), Or the goal is to persuade the regulator that they can squeeze a bit more cargo onto the plane.

The goal might be to normalize weighing all passengers and upcharging by weight. I’m for it.

Instead, it would be more socially acceptable to integrate scales into the jetbridge or aircraft entry that anonymously calculate final load weight.

Doing something like this by making it either optional or "optional" isn't a very good strategy for being either consistent or useful.

It would be tough to also factor in the balance of that weight on the aircraft. Too much weight fore or aft of the wings can be deadly.

I suspect it is cost cutting measure nothing to do with air safety, currently they take number of seats occupied and multiply by a factor of passenger weight and carry on luggage to guess-estimate the fuel required.

More accurate readings = less cost for fuel.

Bad aircraft weight and balance absolutely can cause crashes and get people killed. It's less so the larger the aircraft gets, but still relevant.

AI could be used to effectively estimate the weight

what data are you going to train said AI with?

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