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.
It is my pleasure this is what I like about lemmy, every so often you get to learn something new. I love finding out something I didn’t know before.
I find that very interesting that you think that wind loading could be correct for. I would have that though that would have been impossible. It is interesting to know how things advance.
Keep reading if you want to know more about WOW switchers. Avionics/flight system is not my area but I do know a little about it. The WOW switch is used of course to tell the aircraft it is on the ground. This is used by both the flight computer and the transponder.
The transportation uses the WOW and speed to switch between in-flight or on the ground. Something that ATC uses to help with aid in approach/departure clearances especially if they can’t see the runways in the tower.
It is used by the flight computer in a lot of different ways the main one is for CAT III landing where the auto pilot takes the plane all the way down to landing and rollout. Deploying things like auto brakes, speed brakes, thrust reversers, etc. It can also enable/disable some systems so the pilots can’t accidentally hit a button at the wrong time.
One of the defining features of the WOW system is that it needs to have a positive signal for 2ish seconds in case of bounce on landing. As you could imagine very bad things could happen if the aircraft thinks it is somewhere it isn’t.
Happy exploring.
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.