Finnair is updating its data, asking passengers to weigh in before flights
Finnair is the latest airline to say it will be weighing some of its passengers with their carry-on bags, but it’s not to squeeze out extra revenue or shame anybody for their weight. It’s a much more technocratic reason.
“Airlines are required to update the average weight of passengers every five years, to ensure the data used for flight planning and aircraft balance calculations is accurate,” Finnair said in a statement to Paste BN. “We want to reassure customers that participation is optional and all data collected is anonymous and will not be linked to customers’ personal profiles."
Finnair conducted a similar survey in 2017, and it’s hardly the only airline to do so. Korean Air announced weigh-ins for passengers in August, and Air New Zealand did the same in May.
The weight of an aircraft is an important statistic for safety. A few hundred or thousand pounds can make the difference between a failed or successful takeoff, so pilots need to have a good estimate of how much their plane weighs when fully loaded.
Small airplanes often require every passenger to get on the scale for every flight, but larger commercial jets can successfully determine weight using the law of averages. Rather than weighing every passenger at check-in, commercial airlines typically just establish a weight average for passengers, that is multiplied by the number of people on every flight. However, average weights are not constant over time, so airlines have to make sure the numbers they use are as accurate as possible, which is why surveys like this are conducted periodically around the world.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for Paste BN based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com