Korean Air is asking passengers to step on the scales before boarding
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
No, you don't. Airplanes are designed using a 75kg baseline per passenger, including luggage.
Now. Let's assume that the engineers felt very generous during their payload estimates, and added a 10% buffer (Spoiler alert: they don't). For a 737, with 170 passengers, that will be 1275kg. Taking the 2022 EASA passenger weight averages from the article, assuming a 50-50 male/female passenger distribution, we get an average passenger weight of 75kg, without luggage. Further assuming an average of 10kg of luggage per passenger, we are now 1700kg overweight, which is almost half a ton over the (generous!) maximum payload estimates. And whilst the Europeans are getting notably heavier in recent times, they are not, by any means the heaviest demographic group on earth.
> Overall, a significant weight increase per passenger would be eclipsed by the weight of fuel, cargo and the aircraft itself, said Hilderman. “Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight,” he said.
No, that's not how it works at all. The fuel weight, and the aircraft weight are what they are for one reason, and one reason only. It is the smallest amount of weight the engineers could get away with to safely and economically transport a certain amount of payload (170 pax) over a chosen distance. Increase that payload by 10%, and you will quickly find out that you need a significantly bigger plane (fuselage, wing, engines, landing gear), and a significantly larger amount of fuel to carry the new payload over the same distance.
There are very real safety risks linked to carrying more payload than anticipated (or seriously unbalanced payload distributions) and being outraged about pseudo fat-shaming is not the right answer to this issue.
8 / 7 = 1.142 * 170 - 170 = 24p * 75kg = 1800kg
Pilots calculate the needed fuel depending on weight of the cargo, distance to target, and meteorological conditions on the path. They can only calculate it once they've got the cargo weight (to within a certain degree.)
Very much so, yes. After the check-in is closed, the pilots will calculate the required amount of fuel for the flight based on the number of passengers they have, and the weighted hold luggage. And although the checked-in luggage will not be placed in the hold piece by piece to rebalance the plane correctly, they are roughly distributed to not unbalance the plane too much. (Different story for smaller aircrafts, as they have much stricter weight-placement requirements).
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/faa-investigates-southwest-o...
Despite how ridiculous it sounds they must do something like this, no?
In practice, they follow AIR OPS regulations set by the FAA or EASA, with fairly up-to date weight studies to estimate the average passenger weight. So for your example, if you use the data average obtained for Europeans, you will be, on average, safe when flying Kenyans and North Koreans.
Here is a link to the latest EASA weight study: https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/document-library/research-repo...
That seems a bit low. A person with average height (5'8", 172cm) and borderline overweight BMI (25) is already 74kg. Of course, the average American is probably fatter than that, and has luggage as well, which means they're well above the 75kg design limit.
>> Of course, the average American is probably fatter than that, and has luggage as well, which means they're well above the 75kg design limit.
That's the entire point. When is the point reached where people are getting to fat to safely fly from A to B within the design limits of the airplanes they are flying on. And at which point is time to charge them (and more importantly, allocate) double seats accordingly.
I'm almost a full stone lighter than the 75kg assumption, but I'd never walk into an office and just say I'm average, lets just assume that when designing. That is garbage engineering. Your built in assumptions should include projections that cover the expected lifespan of the product, not what is average in the here and now. A simple regression fit would be better than nothing.
We should better plan for the extrema of humanity as to not implicitly dehumanize people with averages. That just blows.
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/newsroom-and-events/news/easa-...
> EASA contracted Lufthansa Consulting to conduct a field survey and obtain the average weight of passengers, the weight of hand luggage and the weight of checked luggage at six airports, representing different regions in Europe: ATH (Athens Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece), BRU (Brussels, Belgium), CPH (Copenhagen-Kastrup, Denmark), MXP (Milan Malpensa, Italy), MUC (Munich Franz Josef Strauß, Germany), SOF (Sofia, Bulgaria).
> Male passengers have a mean weight of 82.2 kg, which is 14.7 kg more than the average female passenger (67.5 kg).
> The average weight of checked luggage, which is always limited by the luggage policies of the airlines, … averaged 16 kg.
> (Average carry-on luggage weight, from the study: 7.6kg)
For European passengers, men on average brought ~108kg of weight on board, and women ~88kg.
Sorry, but I don’t believe you. Can you please cite which airplanes are designed like this? Considering, as alluded to in another comment, the average weight of an American is above 75kg, cabin bags are likely around 5-10kg per, and checked luggage can go up to around 20kg, and you can purchase additional checked bags, what you say seems incredibly unlikely for a large airliner like the 737.
"Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight"
For most transport aircraft, passenger mass fraction is roughly 12%-18% depending on what's included (cargo, seats, etc.), while fuel mass fraction is around 30% to 40%.
So this ratio is more like 2 or 3, not 20.
Passenger weight is absolutely a huge factor (speaking as an aerospace engineer focusing on vehicle design and flight performance).
There was just a story about a woman who couldn't get back from her 2 month vacation with her dog because the dog was 300 grams overweight as per the rules of the airline.
Meanwhile my fat ass can trounce on the plane and nobody will care as long as I fit in the seat. My carry-on also weighs at least 2 times what the poor dog did. Nobody bats an eye.
Either they need to waive the weight limits or use passenger+luggage as the weight limit.
(Yes I know an anvil in the overhead is dangerous and that's why carry-ons have weight limits).
Airlines don’t fill up the plane’s fuel tanks to the top like people do with their cars. That would greatly increase fuel costs due to the aforementioned reasons. So they try to calculate the exact amount of fuel they need for the trip and then add a safety margin. If the passengers and luggage are a lot heavier than expected it delays the flight because they need to add more fuel.
The only sustainable solution is to weigh passenger + carry on simultaneously and have some kind of limit for that. If you go over, you pay for an extra seat two, one of which stays empty because of plane safety.
This sounds more like a way to skimp on fuel costs.
What I'm trying to say is: if we leave the path of averages, we start to measure everything that contributes to a price, what happens for things that can't be controlled? I don't feel like that's a good choice for a society.
I think we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement here. You think that human systems should follow human ideals first and only deviate when absolutely necessary. I think human systems should follow natural systems and only deviate when absolutely necessary. I think this keeps us grounded and enables the bottom-up growth and evolution of our civilization.
As such I think it is entirely fair that the default is that prices for services should reflect the resources consumed for such a service. I agree there should be exceptions such as healthcare (up to a certain extent that's negotiated within each political unit) but air travel is definitely not one of them.
I see! I understand and it's not that I disagree completely, I'm just worried that losing compassion is way too easy in that case. That everything get's transactional. I've read too much cyberpunk to not be weary of that ;)
His quotes seem to be all over the place. How can he both say "it's not reasonable to weight passengers for the purposes of safety", but also say "periodic weight assessments can help airlines determine if weight estimates are still accurate", and then add in a non-sequitur about European privacy norms and then seat pitches??