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.
In that use case, it makes perfect sense for a binary switch to say I am (not) on the ground. It doesn’t necessarily address the situations in which flight attendants will make manual adjustments to passenger seating assignments in smaller planes while at the gate (which I assume would still involve actual numerical values to some actionable degree of accuracy), but I’ve worked with enough engineered systems to know the design limitations that went into them versus what we wish they would do. That still happens in shipping smartphones. I remember working on a study design from 10 years ago where we could tell the survey team pulled over to the shoulder of the road based on their gps signal but only because they were in the middle of nowhere with a clear line of sight to multiple satellites.