June 1st - Weigh before fly

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Would you tolerate standing on the scales at the airport?

At present, airlines use “assumed mass” – typically 88kg per passenger. Air New Zealand is seeking 10,000 volunteers to ensure that these averages are still accurate. Yet if airlines knew exactly how much each passenger weighs, the captain could load fuel more accurately: reducing fuel burn, and the damage to the planet. Which major airline will be first to introduce the idea?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, Thursday the 1st of June already. Can you believe we are at that point in the summer? And of course, well, apart for anything else, it's the month that the rail strikes began last year, but that's not what
0:21.8	I'm going to talk about today. I am going to be asking whether or not you would tolerate being
0:28.5	weighed before your flight. That is because Air New Zealand is asking for volunteers, about 10,000 of them, to check that the
0:40.2	averages that they use when planning flights are accurate. At the moment, airlines use an
0:48.2	assumed mass. That basically means that if you take 150 people, people say on a typical flight, you would imagine that they all have different weights, of course, you have some young children, you'd have some slim women, you'd have some overweight men.
1:07.2	Gradually they would perhaps average 88 kilograms per person now it's absolutely crucial that that
1:14.6	estimate is as close to reality as possible for two reasons first of all safety if the actual
1:23.7	cabin mass is or weight of people in the cabin is significantly higher, then you will be
1:35.2	putting the aircraft in some danger because the flight landing is all about weight and balance.
1:42.2	Secondly, very often, understandably, pilots will err on the side of caution,
1:48.6	of course they will. They will kind of assume the worst. They will load more fuel just in case they
1:55.0	need it, because ultimately the heavier the plane, the more fuel you need to move it, and the more fuel you need to move it and the more fuel you need to move the
2:03.6	fuel that you are using to move the extra weight if you see what i mean so if just imagine a world
2:12.0	where you do know everybody's weight on the plane that That would be a much better option for, well, from all points of view, increasing safety,
2:24.0	cutting the environmental harm caused by each flight.
2:29.7	But the problem is that people, of the airlines imagine, people would be very resistant to the idea.
2:39.0	Also, it would be quite tricky.
2:40.7	I mean, particularly since we all check in online and first thing we see is at the gate.
2:45.8	So how do you do that?
2:46.8	Well, there's a company called Fuel Matrix, in barkshire startup tech company and they're
2:53.5	actually looking at ways that passengers can be weighed discreetly now um you have typically um self-service
3:04.5	bag drops and you use a screen-based system you pop your baggage on and then you
	...

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