Almost everything that gets onto a commercial plane — fuel, checked-in baggage, cargo and meals — is weighed. For passengers and their cabin bags, most airlines use average data.
But Finland’s national carrier Finnair said Friday that it started asking passengers this week voluntarily and anonymously hop onto a scale with their hand luggage at the country’s main airport in Helsinki, the airline said Friday. The aim is to get their own figures.
“We will need data for both winter season and for summer season — in winter season people typically have heavier clothing, which impacts weights,” Finnair spokeswoman Päivyt Tallqvist told The Associated Press, adding that the survey would last until May.
Passengers boarding onto European and long-haul flights won’t be “penalized for their weight,” and “the numbers are kept discreet, away from prying eyes,” she added.
I absolutely do understand that, but thank you for the detailed explanation.
What I’m saying is this. I’m assuming (based on having flights make adjustments to seating at the gates and just thinking about how I’d design it if I were engineering an airplane) that each wheel/strut measures the weight placed on it while on the ground. This, to some level of accuracy (think back to sig figs from physics 101) gives you the average loading for a flight. You already have the loading for checked baggage (which are already weighed independently as the bags are checked), and I assume something similar is done with any additional cargo. So the total passenger weight (people plus carryons) would be total loading - checked bags - cargo. The passenger/carryon component is automatically an average over that particular flight, since it’s the total weight that you could then divide by the number of passengers. You get that metric for free, since the sensors and data collection is already in place to ensure flight safety and (I assume) required by federal regulations or something.
So you can say that Flight XY3094 that flies from Dallas to NYC at 9AM averages (I’m just making up a number here) 30k lbs of passenger weight. Because you already have the data, you can break that down to seasonal metrics (more weight in Dec and Jan, less in Jun and July eg), compare between flights on the same route but different days of the week or times of day, and so on. You can look at the variability for the data as a whole or within each collection (eg +/- 3000 lbs for winter flights). These are just the most simple examples I can come up with, but hopefully you get the idea. I could have a data scientist write this in such a way that it is constantly updating the stats daily, and be able to perform time series analysis to see whether they’re increasing as a trend over time, or whether the deviations are increasing. I could tie in the data with ad campaigns, to see if those act as a driver that give us a predictive model we could use to offset ad expenses and increased fuel costs versus ticket sales, and so on.
The only additional resolution you’d get from weighing individual passengers/carryon is per passenger variability data, which would not be useful unless they’re looking to build a model where they adjust ticket price by weight of the individual passengers. Remember, they already have the aggregate data. To get the aggregate data from the individual passenger data, they’d have to add them all together then divide by the number of passengers and so on. You could look at stats like the skew in the data (“What percentage of our passenger weight comes from really heavy passengers?”) but again, I don’t see that being useful unless they’re intending to redo their ticket pricing model.
Again, it’s not free. There are costs for collection (purchase and distribution and maintenance of equipment), personnel (“Sir, please stand on this platform. No, like this.” Etc), data collection (physical network and software to collect and transfer the data), analysis (including defining the metrics and writing the software to execute on it and make reports), and actioning the data (business types figuring out what to do with it). That’s easily several million dollars, now that I’m thinking about it step by step.
They have to have justified this - they’re expecting it to pay for itself. I just can’t think of anything unless, despite their denials, this is going to be used to create a legal argument to charge heavy passengers more money.
No you are you are totally right you could analyze each flight that way and they do to a certain extent. All commercial aircraft do have a switch called the Weigh On Wheel sensor, which detects when the gear is loaded. I don’t know the sensitivity of them though. I do know that some planes the WOW is just a on/off switch. Some do use load sensors. I would expect them to have a pretty low resolution. So to do that they would need load cells that are both sensitive and extremely high weight. Plus you can’t just swap parts on a plane. Every part is certified and has all the government red tape. Additionally you can’t really feel it in the passenger cabin but planes move around a lot during loading and in loading. Getting a good data point may be difficult at best. If it is windy forget about it.
Also you would still need to seat people in the class they paid for. So say all the big people are in first. I don’t know I am speculating a bit at this point.
Fundamentally you are correct. I just don’t think that it would be as easy/possible to implement fleet wide. Part of what makes flying safe is the technology of commercial planes is always a generation or two old. So you always have to ask yourself if this could happen ~20 years ago.
Having said all that, discount airlines would love to charge by the pound of flesh. I bet the only reason they don’t is optics.