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A notable part of it is that baggage handling requires people. People have physical limitations and can't always just carry a heavier bag. Most work physical requirements for such jobs specifically say "can carry objects up to 50 pounds. It then requires multiple people or special equipment, which slows down the process. The added expense isn't so much to offset the plane physically carrying the luggage, but helps keep luggage more uniformly distributed within normal tolerances for the human component, and defrays the added cost of additional workers or equipment when it's over.
In the US, there’s actually a legal limit on how much weight a single person can lift before they need assistance. I believe OSHA has it set at 40 pounds. If it’s more than that, you need two people. If it goes above 80, you need three, and so on.
I believe you are correct. All of our job descriptions state "must be able to lift and carry up to 50 lbs occasionally". That's taken directly from OSHA.
That seens awful damn low. I know at best buy a long time ago (18yrs ago ish) we'd use a big joe to get the TVs down. But then we just carried em once they were ground level. Many definitely weighed more than that.
It's low so it covers employees that can't lift a lot of weight and employees that need to lift the weight repeatedly. A lot of people can't easily lift 50lbs without a team lift.
Seems like there should be (although maybe there is?) some sort of certification program to verify certain people can handle higher lifting requirements. Loading buckets of parts or slugs from a machine shop would take eternity following that requirement.
>That seens awful damn low.
Think of it like a highway exit speed limit. They gotta set it to account for cars, motorcycles, etc, but also for tractor trailers, so they choose the limit that everyone can safely follow: the lower one. Doesn't mean you can't choose not to listen (behold the forbidden triple negative)
OP doesn’t understand how weight distribution works in the real world.
If you add too much heavy luggage it throws off the weight distribution. Makes the plane a big pain to fly. Basic stuff.
Also, the higher the risk of someone getting injured, the more they can charge so health insurance is covered.
Edit: Sorry, I guess there’s some stuff I didn’t remember to consider.
They are distributed with the center of mass behind the wings due to the way seating is designed. Stowed luggage has its center of mass at or just in front of the wings.
This is, um, not true I'm afraid. Both baggage and people can be distributed in front of and behind the wings/centre of gravity.
Average weights are used for baggage and people and these are not particularly accurate. They are revised every so often. New Zealand is currently weighing passengers at check in.
What if one side of the plane happens to have a bunch of a jumbos while the other side has a bunch of bean poles? Won’t that mess up the distribution somewhat?
If even hypothetical extreme weight variations of passengers caused issues I'm sure we would have seen it by now. At most you could get an extra 300 pounds on one side per row, so like a 6000 lb difference distributed fairly close to the median / center aisle. A plane weighs like 400,000 lbs
That must be new, or a passenger thing. I did weight and balance for cargo planes and we certainly calculated side to side imbalance, but I suppose cargo can get some wild swings in positional weight that you don’t get with people. Of course, in a decade of doing that I never saw an imbalance out of tolerance in that dimension.
I was once on a very empty flight, and I got to move to Delta+ for free to help with weight distribution. I'm not a heavy guy, but the plane was just all us poor people in the back and none of the rich folks showed up.
i wonder how they knew the weight distribution.
i guess they based it on the number of people and the industry standard for the average person's weight
That’s exactly how. They further subdivide the cabin into different zones, then you take the number of seats full in that zone to determine the zone’s weight contribution.
I don’t know the specifics of that particular flight but hypothetically if you had a bunch of people all seated in the (cheapest) zone at the back and no-one up front, that would make enough of a difference to the CG calculations that you’d want to move some of that weight forward.
Not “the plane won’t fly” territory, but takeoff and trim settings are based off that and would be off by a point or two.
I only fly if the drive is over 5 or 6 hours. I figure the quickest flight I've ever been on was an hour of flight time, but I still have to account for: hour to the airport, 2 hours for security+finding my gate+running to the correct gate, boarding, plane getting prepared for take off, hour flight, getting to the terminal, un boarding, getting out of the airport, finding my car (getting a ride from a friend or renting a car), and then driving to my destination.
Best case scenario I've seen is 3 hours from time I leave my house to getting to my destination, but that was extremely rushed and frantic, and I barely got on the plane. Compared to driving, where I can go at my own urgency and not be stuck to an airline schedule.
Even then, they can also play with fuel distribution as well... to an extent anyways... but if it rlly does get to that point theyll kick off people from the flight
I flew Alaska Airlines once from Seattle to Reno, and the plane was so empty they told us to all sit in the back for weight distribution. It was also the only large plane I ever flew on that had propellers.
Ah the good ol' Q400. We frequently had to keep rows 8-12 empty so as to not screw up the CM. It was already a small space so you would have to tell people they couldn't spread out which of course was uncomfortable for everyone.
During Covid flying sometimes only the back few rows would be filled. Reno gets bumpy too so you would have this light load all in the back getting thrown around. Good times lol
Not an expert at all but a previous experience might interest you.
Few years ago, I flight on a plane only 33% full. The flight attendants knew that we all wanted to move around to get a full 3 row each and more confort. They explain to us that for landing and take of, we should be at our designated place to balance the plane better (I guess that once in the air, it's easier to adjust).
Obviously they might have not share the real reason, but as they only care for the take of and landing phase, I assumed it was the real reason
Takeoff and landing is when thr margin for error is the smallest and controls closer to their extremes. The end result is that they need weight balance and distribution to be right.
During cruise the aircraft has a lot of energy and is fairly level and has a wide margin for various controls - less need to worry about people moving around.
Aside from the weight of a plane which I just googled, directly from my ass. I was thinking 20 rows, 2 seats each side and that two 300 pound people is about as much as you could fit into the two seats. So unless you have two babies on the other side you'd get a 300 - 400 pound difference. In planes with 3 seats each side you could maybe get a 450 pound difference.
So without doing any math, I could raise the 6000lb estimate to 10000lb. Still doesn't seem like enough to cause a plane to tilt.
This can be a concern for very small planes - I've had flights (like 5-10 people) where we had to be weighed and then seated based on that to make sure it was even.
I once had a flight in a "smaller" plane (London to Frankfurt) early in the morning. So we only were what looked like a handful of people in that plane. The flight attendant then asked us to spread to other seats a bit during takeoff - we were allowed to return once in the air.
No. Side to side weight differences don't matter when the weight is on the non lifting component in between the wings
I don't even think they bother measuring for it
This was actually a small problem to worry about in my last job. Worked in a grocery warehouse, we built pallets of grocery items and loaded them onto trailers to go across state lines. We were told to make sure to distribute weight evenly when loading the trailers cause it wasn’t unheard of that there had been times where all the liquids and cans were loaded on one side and all the paper products and cereal on the other and a trailer or two had flipped onto their sides when making a sharp turn.
the big long dimension is more importanter, side to side is a relatively small distance so a smaller moment arm and whats more with the moment arm of the wings it could be easily counteracted, fromt to back however that whole thing is balanced on where the wings are. in a smaller plane you can really feel it. if you push down on the back of a cessna you can lift the whole front end off the ground and go until the back touches the ground, and during school ive been on a beechcraft king air and when i got on it i could feel the plane go down a good bit
I was on a tiny 20-passenger plane in an infrequent route once with this exact problem. My family was a bit on the larger side, plus one guy that must have weighed at least 500 pounds, and other larger people were all sitting on the right side of the plane. The left side had a couple empty seats and everyone who sat there was thin. A flight attendant came and asked if two of us could switch to two of the empty seats on the other side of the airplane because the pilot felt a disbalance during takeoff, which of course we did.
I've been on a flight where they moved people around for weight distribution.
There's strain gauges in the landing gear I suppose. They specifically moved bigger people rearward on that flight, said something about it being a short takeoff for the size of aircraft.
Planes carry fuel in the wings. It’s not always perfectly balanced. A 737 has a maximum takeoff weight near 180,000 lbs and limits the fuel imbalance to 1,000 lbs between the wing tanks. Because the passengers sit much closer to the center of gravity, you would have to have an enormous difference in passenger weights to get a comparable imbalance. Even then, the 737 could still fly with a huge imbalance, but it would lose efficiency due to the required deflection of the flight controls. Controllability is not the limiting factor, efficiency is.
Occasionally people will be asked to sit on one side or another depending on weight in very small planes. Can't imagine it's an issue on passenger planes though.
The statement you provided seems to contain some inaccuracies. Let me clarify the correct terminology and provide a more accurate explanation:
In an aircraft, the distribution of mass is important for stability and control. The center of gravity (CG) refers to the average location of the aircraft's weight or mass. It is typically expressed as a longitudinal distance from a reference point, such as the nose or leading edge of the wings.
Regarding the seating arrangement, the center of mass of passengers and their belongings is generally positioned closer to the wings rather than behind them. This configuration helps maintain a balanced distribution of weight within the aircraft. While specific seating designs may vary between different aircraft models, the center of mass is typically located near the wings to ensure proper balance and stability during flight.
As for stowed luggage, its center of mass is typically positioned closer to the front of the wings rather than at or just in front of them. This placement helps maintain a favorable balance and prevents excessive pitching moments caused by luggage shifting during flight.
To summarize, the center of gravity in an aircraft is generally positioned near the wings due to the seating design, and stowed luggage has its center of mass closer to the front of the wings to maintain stability.
Seating isn't really designed around passenger weight. They do not ask for weight when you book a ticket and you can choose which class you're in and sometimes what specific seat. Additionally you don't want the center of mass behind the wings at all. Where did you get this information?
>They are distributed with the center of mass behind the wings due to the way seating is designed
which is weird considering you generally want the center of mass on a non-fighter aircraft to be in front of the center of lift. fighters with advanced control systems can abuse the instability of it being behind the center of lift to gain maneuverability while other planes have no real use for it.
But why are there weight limits to personal items and carry on luggage though? I basically never check a bag because I can pack light, but I’ve still been told my bag that will go between my legs is too heavy.
If my bag is 5 pounds over, but I myself am half the weight of the person next to me, isn’t that kind of weird?
Firstly, planes generally want to have the centre of mass slightly in front of the centre of lift (in essence wings) because this in general gives more stable flight characteristics. If the centre of mass is behind then the plane "wants" to stall, which often is a precursor to a crash.
Secondly, [this boeing 747](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5355acbde4b05f484021902e/1399411140514-3HD66NRW9OZRJ5CGORN7/image-asset.jpeg) shows the checked luggage compartment being mostly centred to the centre of lift and going most of the length of the plane body. And I can see no evidence of the passengers being distributed with the centre of mass *behind* the wings.
In at least the 737 and A320 there are multiple cargo compartments. For the airline I did ground handling at we would load the front one of the A320 to 50 bags, then put everything else in the back. I would doubt that if all the bags were even 80 pounds the plane would be outside CG limits.
This suggests that we should be ~~giving~~ *forcing* obese people *to take* extra luggage ~~allowance~~ to maintain balance.
edit: Sorry, just realised it would have to be a bit more forceful than simply giving for it to actually make sense haha
https://simpleflying.com/air-midwest-flight-5481-crash-anniversary/#:~:text=Today%20marks%2020%20years%20since,and%20actual%20passenger%20weights%20onboard.
The plane crashes.
The initial post has nothing to do with weight distribution.
OP stated you have to pay if your luggage is 5 lbs pounds overweight, but the passenger weight has no impact on these extra fees.
It's not only heavy luggage that affects the CG (center of gravity) of an aircraft, but also where the passengers are seated. Let's say you have a plane with 20 rows with 4 seats in each row, and you fill the last 4 rows at the rear of the plane with 250lbs passengers (250lbs\*16 seats = 4000lbs), and the rest of the seats forward are empty. Also, these passengers have no luggage.
*So even If you add too many heavy* ***people*** *it throws off the weight distribution. Makes the plane a big pain to fly. Basic stuff.*
That’s because the cargo shifted during flight, not because it was too heavy. Also pretty sure that was an actual cargo plane, carrying heavy machinery or something, not suitcases.
Seems to me like OP’s whole point is about weight distribution in the real world. Humans can weigh from 100-300lbs or more, which is a huge un-controlled variation in load on the plane. The baggage weight is a highly controlled variable. The same standards aren’t held to the largest percentage of the planes cargo capacity (the passengers).
Depends on the size of the plane and the total passenger count. I've been on some pretty small half filled commercial aircraft where they did in fact take men off the window seats and move them to aisle seats to balance the load, but this was in propeller planes so not really the average experience.
Seems you don't understand either though...
If what you say matters wouldn't it also matter if half of a plane was full of 250lb dude and the other half 90 lb children?
So when I pay €75 for 5kg extra, suddenly the baggage handler is allowed to carry that extra weight?
So you literally pay money for OSHA to be ignored?
The €75 offsets the cost of the second person that technically should help them. An more importantly, deters heavy weight in the first place so the system isn’t slowed down to handle heavy bags.
Also, they have OSHA in the EU? It’s not called something else?
Yeah I mean to an extent, but that’s more a concern with massive cargo like freight, or shifting loads. With commercial jets, which weigh hundreds of tonnes, the pilots can trim the control surfaces to deal with relatively minor imbalances without the autopilot having to compensate with the entire elevator.
A 100lb object falling out of an overhead bin is way more dangerous than a 30lb item. But if it’s dense enough and looks small, they probably wouldn’t notice.
A 100lb carryon would take up too much space either in the aisle or overhead. A person weighing 100lb more than you will still, usually, fit in the space designed for people.
MONEY! That's why many budget airlines charge for carry-on in general.
The checked baggage thing is also money, with the added expenses of employer liability and insurance requirements.
Curiously, Samoa Air, a really small and now defunct airline with two planes, [charged customers by total weight displacement.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoa_Air#Pay_by_weight)
Although it is fair and viable to change up an airline model to charge by total weight displacement, it probably wouldn't be worth the huge public relations hit, loss of business (69% of American adults are overweight), and cost and risk of weighing customers; it's especially not done in perfect due to the current systems that others already mentioned.
EDIT: [Air New Zealand is weighing people in a survey for safety reasons](https://apnews.com/article/air-new-zealand-weighing-passengers-82ba4e52dee3d4a5ef005885ac251bb6), mostly collecting data on people in line with New Zealand's regulations.
>and cost and risk of weighing customers
Random thought - how about charging by *total weight*?
Get yourself and everything you're carrying onto the scale, hand luggage and all.
That's what I was talking about.
Either way, it still would be risky. Most people aren't really comfortable getting onto a scale, even if the results are hidden to the public or they're weighed with bags. The potential alienation of being charged even a dollar more for weighing more is not worth the slight gain for the company.
That’s what they say, but no one ever does it even if they should. I’m a flight attendant. We once had a passenger so large she took up an entire row in economy, like someone you’d see on “my 600lb life”. She was really sweet so I helped her find an empty row. Thank god we had lots of open seats on the flight or she would have had to wait for a flight that would fit her and they probably would have charged her for the extra seats.
The gate attendants aren't carrying you to your seat. Your baggage on the other hand needs people to carry it and anything ober 50 lbs is a two person lift
Because airline attendants are not literally lifting you up by their bare hands and throwing you into the luggage compartment while you sit there, inert.
Or are you? I'm always open to new airline experiences!
I don't know if the following plays into this, but as an aside: Major airlines [are unregulated banks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4) that make their money not primarily off the passengers flying, but off other companies buying their loyalty program bonuses.
The baggage handlers union has negotiated these extra fees into the collective bargaining agreement. If the baggage handlers have to carry more than the contracted weight, the airline gets charged a fee/penalty, the airline then passes it onto the customer.
The alternative to that fee/penalty is to assign 2 handlers to move the bag (which is *ideally* the behavior desired by the union, rather than continuing to risk injuring workers and just paying the fines instead), in which case your bag is using up the time of 2 employees instead of 1, therefore costing more money to move your bag.
Granted, I definitely can't speak from any experience whether the 2-carrier rule is *actually* obeyed in practice, or whether the employers just eat the penalties instead. That's just how it's supposed to go.
Don’t they charge you extra on how big you are now? Some larger people are forced to buy two seats aren’t they?
Wasn’t there a story where a large woman had to buy two seats, but they weren’t even next to each other?
It's not due to the weight limit of the plane, it's due to the lifting capacity of the workers loading the plane. You can really hurt yourself if you're quickly lifting bags that you're expecting to be around 50lb only to have one come along that's 80 or so.
That’s exactly why. They have a maximum weight, say 100,000 lbs. There is a calculated buffer for humans. For example, let’s say the average weight of passengers is 60,000 lbs. That is really a range between 50,000 and 70,000. With fuel and luggage, we can only go up to like 20,000 lbs. That brings the average to 80,000 lbs but gives us 10,000 lbs of wiggle room for heavy people. If everyone on the plane is overweight, we may get up to 90,000 lbs. Then we have an extra 10,000 lbs just because we never want to be *at* capacity. So, they have to be really strict about the non-human weight in order to keep the buffer intact.
Also, as others have said, people have to carry the luggage.
What a bizarre argument. If we go with your example of ~300 passengers, 5 lbs overweight baggage per passenger is just another 1500 pounds, which is insignificant compared to 10k pound buffer. The point that the OP makes and which you missed is that the extra baggage weight is very small compared to human weight variance.
Human weight will average out over 100+ people, the variance of the average is really small. But if they are lax on baggage weight, many people will push the limit and it will have a bigger effect on the overall weight.
Yep. It's not like people will go wild and put on weight before travelling just to stick it up to the airline.
Luggage, on the other hand, is very easy to load up. Limits are necessary because people will abuse it otherwise.
It's not a capacity limit on the plane, it's maximum lift weight regulations for the baggage handlers. Most jobs where you lift things have an insurance limit (usually 50lbs solo or 100lbs assisted) and if you injure yourself moving more than that insurance won't cover you.
The baggage weight limit is designed for employees working with luggage, in order to prevent them from straining or otherwise hurting themselves. Your suitcases are fat packs of shit, they're heavy and difficult to load in a confined space.
And, ironically, you can literally give an arm and a leg, that'll lower your body weight by like 30 lbs. Won't matter to the airline. Still gonna get that overweight baggage fee,
In some instances, airlines do charge large people more by making them pay for two seats. But generally, any weight-based pricing approach to passengers themselves would be met with all sorts of outrage alleging the airlines are doing nothing more than fat-shaming in the name of increasing profits.
New Zealand wants to start weighing passengers. Right now it's inconspicuous and voluntary but Pandora's box has been opened on a new way to get ripped off
Fleet engineer for one of the big 4 in the US.
For everything except people (which is estimated and accounted via seating) any weight addition requires a W&B (weight and balance) report. Last week I had one that accounted for 2 pounds just aft of the wings (ie close to COG)
There are the baggage handlers to account for in weight as well as some wiggle room in weight distribution but it is very important outside of just fuel.
If the airlines could get away with charging you more for your weight, they would.
They will charge you for an extra seat if you don’t fit in just one.
Simple reason. If you take the weight of a couple hundred people on a plane and average it out, and compare this to samples from different flights, it will remain at a fairly consistent average. This average is accounted for in plane ticket prices.
Meanwhile, with bags, this is controllable, and if airline didn't control it, they'd know that people would be a lot more limitless with how much they carry, costing the airline a lot more.
That, as well as safety reasons relating to bags. Also, human weight isn't exactly controllable in the short term like baggage weight is (emphasis on short term/convenience. Of course I don't mean people can't lose weight), and there'd probably be controversy if airlines charged by the weight of an individual, not to mention the extra costs + inconvenience of weighing everyone etc. So it is merely just averaged out.
Are you being picked up and placed anywhere by someone? No? You can walk, or maybe mobility reduced and need a wheelchair?
You pay extra cause people have to lift your heavy bags. The heavier the bag, the slower the process. So yes you pay more, because they are working harder.
Fuck, I hate when you people think you smart, or logical when asking these questions.
That is such an idiotic take, you can't change your weight in 5 minutes. You can the luggage
Besides you're hauling your own ass, but not the luggage. How'd you feel if you were a luggage handler and 200+ people would all bring slightly overweight luggage?
OK I’ve never thought about this before, but now I need to know how the airline calculates how much fuel they need for an aircraft based on who’s flying.
Like, if you have a flight with six people on it, and those six people are children, that is very different than if you have a flight with six people and they’re all football linebackers. I figured they calculated those fuel requirement pretty carefully to include luggage, I mean, that’s why they’re wearing it right? When are they wearing us?
They use average weight for an adult. Children have different tickets so they're taken into account.
If you buy "adult" tickets but then show up with kids, the check-in or gate agents are supposed to add a code to the passenger manifest noting that those customers are children.
This is why I love Reddit so much, someone will always have an actual legit answer.
Which led me down an interesting rabbit hole! Here is an article about how airlines are going to have to calculate new average passenger weights because we're getting bigger and we're carrying more stuff in our pockets, like cell phones. It affects everything including safety plans etc.
[https://unitedafa.org/news/2021/6/10/heavier-passengers-on-planes-mean-new-safety-limits-for-airlines](https://unitedafa.org/news/2021/6/10/heavier-passengers-on-planes-mean-new-safety-limits-for-airlines)
Here is an article about how the weights are calculated:
[https://pilotteacher.com/how-do-airlines-calculate-passenger-weight/](https://pilotteacher.com/how-do-airlines-calculate-passenger-weight/)
The most interesting part for me being that the average weights are different in summer and winter, because generally you've got coats and boots vs shorts and flip flops.
The only reason the weight of a human can vary by a few hundred pounds is there are unhinged people in this world who eat themselves into their grave with complete disregard for everything and everyone around them. Imo airlines should tax obese humans more too
This is precisely why small deviations in luggage get slapped, less surprises with humans and lots of surprises with luggage. luggage can be 2lbs or 200lbs. The overall effect on an airplane can be catastrophic if not controlled. With humans you can plan for a certain weight discrepancy within normal limits.
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A notable part of it is that baggage handling requires people. People have physical limitations and can't always just carry a heavier bag. Most work physical requirements for such jobs specifically say "can carry objects up to 50 pounds. It then requires multiple people or special equipment, which slows down the process. The added expense isn't so much to offset the plane physically carrying the luggage, but helps keep luggage more uniformly distributed within normal tolerances for the human component, and defrays the added cost of additional workers or equipment when it's over.
In the US, there’s actually a legal limit on how much weight a single person can lift before they need assistance. I believe OSHA has it set at 40 pounds. If it’s more than that, you need two people. If it goes above 80, you need three, and so on.
I did safe lifting training last spring and they said 50lb was the current osha limit iirc
I believe you are correct. All of our job descriptions state "must be able to lift and carry up to 50 lbs occasionally". That's taken directly from OSHA.
50 lbs for single carry. 100 lbs for 2-person carry. Anything over 100 should have mechanical assistance.
Shit we lifted 50 lbs bags of popcorn kernels when I was a scrawny 15 year old.
I used to work at sears warehouse...the stuff we did was certainly not meeting these requirements
That seens awful damn low. I know at best buy a long time ago (18yrs ago ish) we'd use a big joe to get the TVs down. But then we just carried em once they were ground level. Many definitely weighed more than that.
Obviously, a human can lift way higher than that. But workers need to do that over and over again for many hours per day.
Add onto that most people probably dont lift with good form and will inevitably hurt themselves.
OSHA's regulations and what people do are entirely separate things
Most places I've worked act like you're being a dick if you say something they're asking you to do is against OSHA regulations
\> That seens awful damn low. More might result in permanent spine damage, for an average person.
It's low so it covers employees that can't lift a lot of weight and employees that need to lift the weight repeatedly. A lot of people can't easily lift 50lbs without a team lift.
Seems like there should be (although maybe there is?) some sort of certification program to verify certain people can handle higher lifting requirements. Loading buckets of parts or slugs from a machine shop would take eternity following that requirement.
>That seens awful damn low. Think of it like a highway exit speed limit. They gotta set it to account for cars, motorcycles, etc, but also for tractor trailers, so they choose the limit that everyone can safely follow: the lower one. Doesn't mean you can't choose not to listen (behold the forbidden triple negative)
OP doesn’t understand how weight distribution works in the real world. If you add too much heavy luggage it throws off the weight distribution. Makes the plane a big pain to fly. Basic stuff. Also, the higher the risk of someone getting injured, the more they can charge so health insurance is covered. Edit: Sorry, I guess there’s some stuff I didn’t remember to consider.
What if you add too much big people?
They are distributed with the center of mass behind the wings due to the way seating is designed. Stowed luggage has its center of mass at or just in front of the wings.
This is, um, not true I'm afraid. Both baggage and people can be distributed in front of and behind the wings/centre of gravity. Average weights are used for baggage and people and these are not particularly accurate. They are revised every so often. New Zealand is currently weighing passengers at check in.
What if one side of the plane happens to have a bunch of a jumbos while the other side has a bunch of bean poles? Won’t that mess up the distribution somewhat?
If even hypothetical extreme weight variations of passengers caused issues I'm sure we would have seen it by now. At most you could get an extra 300 pounds on one side per row, so like a 6000 lb difference distributed fairly close to the median / center aisle. A plane weighs like 400,000 lbs
Side to side weight distribution doesn't matter on a plane, they aren't wide enough. Only front to back matters and is measured.
You know youre too fat when plane starts to climb when you use the bathroom at the back
Sounds like a "Yo mamma's so fat" joke in the making
Lol yeah There should be sub like theydidthemath but for yo mamma jokes.
Yo momma’s so dumb she didn’t understand basic physics and the plane crashed when she went to the rear bathroom. Because she’s fat.
I once felt a woman walk. I felt it because whenever she took a step the plane experienced turbulence 🤣
That must be new, or a passenger thing. I did weight and balance for cargo planes and we certainly calculated side to side imbalance, but I suppose cargo can get some wild swings in positional weight that you don’t get with people. Of course, in a decade of doing that I never saw an imbalance out of tolerance in that dimension.
I was once on a very empty flight, and I got to move to Delta+ for free to help with weight distribution. I'm not a heavy guy, but the plane was just all us poor people in the back and none of the rich folks showed up.
i wonder how they knew the weight distribution. i guess they based it on the number of people and the industry standard for the average person's weight
That’s exactly how. They further subdivide the cabin into different zones, then you take the number of seats full in that zone to determine the zone’s weight contribution. I don’t know the specifics of that particular flight but hypothetically if you had a bunch of people all seated in the (cheapest) zone at the back and no-one up front, that would make enough of a difference to the CG calculations that you’d want to move some of that weight forward. Not “the plane won’t fly” territory, but takeoff and trim settings are based off that and would be off by a point or two.
Friendly reminder that it required a plane crash to make Americans realise they're too heavy (Air midwest 5481)
I'd be pissed if I died on a flight that could have been a two hour drive.
I only fly if the drive is over 5 or 6 hours. I figure the quickest flight I've ever been on was an hour of flight time, but I still have to account for: hour to the airport, 2 hours for security+finding my gate+running to the correct gate, boarding, plane getting prepared for take off, hour flight, getting to the terminal, un boarding, getting out of the airport, finding my car (getting a ride from a friend or renting a car), and then driving to my destination. Best case scenario I've seen is 3 hours from time I leave my house to getting to my destination, but that was extremely rushed and frantic, and I barely got on the plane. Compared to driving, where I can go at my own urgency and not be stuck to an airline schedule.
Or a 30 minute high speed train trip ... if we had decent infrastructure.
We would have to have more than just decent infrastructure to have had high speed rail between Charlotte and Spartansburg in 2003.
Even then, they can also play with fuel distribution as well... to an extent anyways... but if it rlly does get to that point theyll kick off people from the flight
I flew Alaska Airlines once from Seattle to Reno, and the plane was so empty they told us to all sit in the back for weight distribution. It was also the only large plane I ever flew on that had propellers.
Ah the good ol' Q400. We frequently had to keep rows 8-12 empty so as to not screw up the CM. It was already a small space so you would have to tell people they couldn't spread out which of course was uncomfortable for everyone. During Covid flying sometimes only the back few rows would be filled. Reno gets bumpy too so you would have this light load all in the back getting thrown around. Good times lol
Not an expert at all but a previous experience might interest you. Few years ago, I flight on a plane only 33% full. The flight attendants knew that we all wanted to move around to get a full 3 row each and more confort. They explain to us that for landing and take of, we should be at our designated place to balance the plane better (I guess that once in the air, it's easier to adjust). Obviously they might have not share the real reason, but as they only care for the take of and landing phase, I assumed it was the real reason
Takeoff and landing is when thr margin for error is the smallest and controls closer to their extremes. The end result is that they need weight balance and distribution to be right. During cruise the aircraft has a lot of energy and is fairly level and has a wide margin for various controls - less need to worry about people moving around.
Where are you getting these numbers?
Aside from the weight of a plane which I just googled, directly from my ass. I was thinking 20 rows, 2 seats each side and that two 300 pound people is about as much as you could fit into the two seats. So unless you have two babies on the other side you'd get a 300 - 400 pound difference. In planes with 3 seats each side you could maybe get a 450 pound difference. So without doing any math, I could raise the 6000lb estimate to 10000lb. Still doesn't seem like enough to cause a plane to tilt.
At least tell us what plane you used in your example. This one only fits 80 people. There's planes that carry 800.
This can be a concern for very small planes - I've had flights (like 5-10 people) where we had to be weighed and then seated based on that to make sure it was even.
I once had a flight in a "smaller" plane (London to Frankfurt) early in the morning. So we only were what looked like a handful of people in that plane. The flight attendant then asked us to spread to other seats a bit during takeoff - we were allowed to return once in the air.
No. Side to side weight differences don't matter when the weight is on the non lifting component in between the wings I don't even think they bother measuring for it
This was actually a small problem to worry about in my last job. Worked in a grocery warehouse, we built pallets of grocery items and loaded them onto trailers to go across state lines. We were told to make sure to distribute weight evenly when loading the trailers cause it wasn’t unheard of that there had been times where all the liquids and cans were loaded on one side and all the paper products and cereal on the other and a trailer or two had flipped onto their sides when making a sharp turn.
My partner's family was once asked to split up on a train in Campania for this reason.
https://youtu.be/-irvEWMIUO0 Skip to 40 seconds in.
the big long dimension is more importanter, side to side is a relatively small distance so a smaller moment arm and whats more with the moment arm of the wings it could be easily counteracted, fromt to back however that whole thing is balanced on where the wings are. in a smaller plane you can really feel it. if you push down on the back of a cessna you can lift the whole front end off the ground and go until the back touches the ground, and during school ive been on a beechcraft king air and when i got on it i could feel the plane go down a good bit
What if all the ones with beards are on one side and all the ones without are on the other?
Do a barrel roll!
Side-to-side doesn’t matter that much - the difference in distance from the centerline of the axis is relatively small.
I was on a tiny 20-passenger plane in an infrequent route once with this exact problem. My family was a bit on the larger side, plus one guy that must have weighed at least 500 pounds, and other larger people were all sitting on the right side of the plane. The left side had a couple empty seats and everyone who sat there was thin. A flight attendant came and asked if two of us could switch to two of the empty seats on the other side of the airplane because the pilot felt a disbalance during takeoff, which of course we did.
I've been on a flight where they moved people around for weight distribution. There's strain gauges in the landing gear I suppose. They specifically moved bigger people rearward on that flight, said something about it being a short takeoff for the size of aircraft.
Planes carry fuel in the wings. It’s not always perfectly balanced. A 737 has a maximum takeoff weight near 180,000 lbs and limits the fuel imbalance to 1,000 lbs between the wing tanks. Because the passengers sit much closer to the center of gravity, you would have to have an enormous difference in passenger weights to get a comparable imbalance. Even then, the 737 could still fly with a huge imbalance, but it would lose efficiency due to the required deflection of the flight controls. Controllability is not the limiting factor, efficiency is.
Occasionally people will be asked to sit on one side or another depending on weight in very small planes. Can't imagine it's an issue on passenger planes though.
No they aren't, they don't ask your weight when you book your ticket
The statement you provided seems to contain some inaccuracies. Let me clarify the correct terminology and provide a more accurate explanation: In an aircraft, the distribution of mass is important for stability and control. The center of gravity (CG) refers to the average location of the aircraft's weight or mass. It is typically expressed as a longitudinal distance from a reference point, such as the nose or leading edge of the wings. Regarding the seating arrangement, the center of mass of passengers and their belongings is generally positioned closer to the wings rather than behind them. This configuration helps maintain a balanced distribution of weight within the aircraft. While specific seating designs may vary between different aircraft models, the center of mass is typically located near the wings to ensure proper balance and stability during flight. As for stowed luggage, its center of mass is typically positioned closer to the front of the wings rather than at or just in front of them. This placement helps maintain a favorable balance and prevents excessive pitching moments caused by luggage shifting during flight. To summarize, the center of gravity in an aircraft is generally positioned near the wings due to the seating design, and stowed luggage has its center of mass closer to the front of the wings to maintain stability.
Seating isn't really designed around passenger weight. They do not ask for weight when you book a ticket and you can choose which class you're in and sometimes what specific seat. Additionally you don't want the center of mass behind the wings at all. Where did you get this information?
>They are distributed with the center of mass behind the wings due to the way seating is designed which is weird considering you generally want the center of mass on a non-fighter aircraft to be in front of the center of lift. fighters with advanced control systems can abuse the instability of it being behind the center of lift to gain maneuverability while other planes have no real use for it.
that's just... incorrect? the luggage hold usually has the same length as the passenger cabin
But why are there weight limits to personal items and carry on luggage though? I basically never check a bag because I can pack light, but I’ve still been told my bag that will go between my legs is too heavy. If my bag is 5 pounds over, but I myself am half the weight of the person next to me, isn’t that kind of weird?
Lol wtf ? Have you been on a plane? A lot of seats are infront of the wings. 1/3-1/2 the seats are in front.
If 1/3 of seats are in front of the wings then the center of mass is still behind them.
So you’re saying if I don’t want to be seated next to a big person, don’t sit in the middle? Got it
Firstly, planes generally want to have the centre of mass slightly in front of the centre of lift (in essence wings) because this in general gives more stable flight characteristics. If the centre of mass is behind then the plane "wants" to stall, which often is a precursor to a crash. Secondly, [this boeing 747](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5355acbde4b05f484021902e/1399411140514-3HD66NRW9OZRJ5CGORN7/image-asset.jpeg) shows the checked luggage compartment being mostly centred to the centre of lift and going most of the length of the plane body. And I can see no evidence of the passengers being distributed with the centre of mass *behind* the wings.
In at least the 737 and A320 there are multiple cargo compartments. For the airline I did ground handling at we would load the front one of the A320 to 50 bags, then put everything else in the back. I would doubt that if all the bags were even 80 pounds the plane would be outside CG limits.
This suggests that we should be ~~giving~~ *forcing* obese people *to take* extra luggage ~~allowance~~ to maintain balance. edit: Sorry, just realised it would have to be a bit more forceful than simply giving for it to actually make sense haha
I've been on fairly empty flights where they've asked people to remain in their assigned seat in order not to mess up weight distribution
https://simpleflying.com/air-midwest-flight-5481-crash-anniversary/#:~:text=Today%20marks%2020%20years%20since,and%20actual%20passenger%20weights%20onboard. The plane crashes.
I'm too fat, that's why I sometimes think about losing weight. But sometimes there is a time when you can't avoid eating a lot.
> But sometimes there is a time when you can't avoid eating a lot. To stop shoveling extra calories in your mouth is a great start.
r/thanksimcured
The initial post has nothing to do with weight distribution. OP stated you have to pay if your luggage is 5 lbs pounds overweight, but the passenger weight has no impact on these extra fees. It's not only heavy luggage that affects the CG (center of gravity) of an aircraft, but also where the passengers are seated. Let's say you have a plane with 20 rows with 4 seats in each row, and you fill the last 4 rows at the rear of the plane with 250lbs passengers (250lbs\*16 seats = 4000lbs), and the rest of the seats forward are empty. Also, these passengers have no luggage. *So even If you add too many heavy* ***people*** *it throws off the weight distribution. Makes the plane a big pain to fly. Basic stuff.*
Why you gotta hate on OP for having a shower thought? 😭 they probably didn’t even think about the weight distribution
Air crash investigation the Show did one on a plane that crashed because of the moving luggage in the hold if memory serves me :-)
That’s because the cargo shifted during flight, not because it was too heavy. Also pretty sure that was an actual cargo plane, carrying heavy machinery or something, not suitcases.
It was carrying Humvees. Straps weren't fitted properly and they rolled to the back on takeoff
Was one of the Humvees 5 pounds overweight?
Haha, no. It was a fit Humvee.
Isn't that what I just said? I never alluded to it being too heavy!
No? You said luggage. Luggage suggests passengers traveling. Cargo I shipment of items typically without a passenger. Numbers are cargo, not luggage.
Seems to me like OP’s whole point is about weight distribution in the real world. Humans can weigh from 100-300lbs or more, which is a huge un-controlled variation in load on the plane. The baggage weight is a highly controlled variable. The same standards aren’t held to the largest percentage of the planes cargo capacity (the passengers).
Depends on the size of the plane and the total passenger count. I've been on some pretty small half filled commercial aircraft where they did in fact take men off the window seats and move them to aisle seats to balance the load, but this was in propeller planes so not really the average experience.
You do realize that airlines know the weight of every single bag and can simply organize them to keep the center of mass in the right place?
The dudes loading bags onto the plane are not organizing the bags by weight
Sorry, sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t understand how weight distribution works in the real world
Ain't that what the trim system is for? Can't tell me that airliners trim systems can't account for this when their working range is absolutely nuts.
Seems you don't understand either though... If what you say matters wouldn't it also matter if half of a plane was full of 250lb dude and the other half 90 lb children?
So when I pay €75 for 5kg extra, suddenly the baggage handler is allowed to carry that extra weight? So you literally pay money for OSHA to be ignored?
The €75 offsets the cost of the second person that technically should help them. An more importantly, deters heavy weight in the first place so the system isn’t slowed down to handle heavy bags. Also, they have OSHA in the EU? It’s not called something else?
It's called EU-OSHA specifically. But many countries have their own labor restrictions too (UK has HSE, NL has ARBO etc)
Yeah I mean to an extent, but that’s more a concern with massive cargo like freight, or shifting loads. With commercial jets, which weigh hundreds of tonnes, the pilots can trim the control surfaces to deal with relatively minor imbalances without the autopilot having to compensate with the entire elevator.
Okay but if I am 180 pounds why can't I have a 100 lb carryon, but the 280lb person behind me gets their 30lb carry on.
A 100lb object falling out of an overhead bin is way more dangerous than a 30lb item. But if it’s dense enough and looks small, they probably wouldn’t notice.
A 100lb carryon would take up too much space either in the aisle or overhead. A person weighing 100lb more than you will still, usually, fit in the space designed for people.
Also, to start penalizing people because they were over a certain weight would create an incredible amount of public relations issues for an airline.
To be honest, I was suddenly confused by this post. What Do You Mean?
[удалено]
True Reddit moment, someone not realizing that actual humans load luggage on to planes
If they could charge you extra for your weight withought being sued, they would.
carry-on is also charged extra, at least in my country. i handle carry-on myself, why charge extra?
Because there is limited space for carryons in the overhead luggage racks, especially on older or smaller planes. The cost is a deterrent.
MONEY! That's why many budget airlines charge for carry-on in general. The checked baggage thing is also money, with the added expenses of employer liability and insurance requirements.
They don't have to employ baggage handlers to carry my fat ass across a hot tarmac and toss me into a luggage compartment.
Best answer.
Unless you're dead.
If you're dead you go the other way
"We limit bags at 50lbs, because we care about our luggage handlers unless you pay a fee then we don't"
the fee discourages bags over 50 lbs...I suppose another option could be to require all bags be under 50lbs and discard contents over that weight
Most airlines outside the US do have weight restrictions on carry on luggage though. And these change by airline class.
Curiously, Samoa Air, a really small and now defunct airline with two planes, [charged customers by total weight displacement.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoa_Air#Pay_by_weight) Although it is fair and viable to change up an airline model to charge by total weight displacement, it probably wouldn't be worth the huge public relations hit, loss of business (69% of American adults are overweight), and cost and risk of weighing customers; it's especially not done in perfect due to the current systems that others already mentioned. EDIT: [Air New Zealand is weighing people in a survey for safety reasons](https://apnews.com/article/air-new-zealand-weighing-passengers-82ba4e52dee3d4a5ef005885ac251bb6), mostly collecting data on people in line with New Zealand's regulations.
I mean, have you ever seen a Samoan? They are not exactly small people.
>and cost and risk of weighing customers Random thought - how about charging by *total weight*? Get yourself and everything you're carrying onto the scale, hand luggage and all.
That's what I was talking about. Either way, it still would be risky. Most people aren't really comfortable getting onto a scale, even if the results are hidden to the public or they're weighed with bags. The potential alienation of being charged even a dollar more for weighing more is not worth the slight gain for the company.
>69% of American adults are overweight Nice
It really wouldn't bother me much to pay based on my weight and im not a skinny person roughly 5'7" and 215lbs
It's for the safety and comfort of baggage handlers. Fifty pounds is the limit for one worker to lift alone.
They will also charge you for an extra seat if you're to wide for just one.
But if you’re too tall you just have to suffer.
What you want them to do? Cut a hole in the roof?
So what if I do?
You can buy extra leg room though
Page me when they start offering shoulder room, because I'm wider than the seat and not fat.
What about first class? You can always buy more comfort just depends on how much you value it.
Leg room isn't nearly as much of a problem as having the headrest in my shoulders
You don't have to. Just upgrade your seat to business class. We're still talking about using money to solve problems right?
Buy an upgraded seat
Which sucks because you cant control height.
You can smoke and avoid drinking milk as a child
Buy the seat in front of you and use that seat as an ottoman.
That’s what they say, but no one ever does it even if they should. I’m a flight attendant. We once had a passenger so large she took up an entire row in economy, like someone you’d see on “my 600lb life”. She was really sweet so I helped her find an empty row. Thank god we had lots of open seats on the flight or she would have had to wait for a flight that would fit her and they probably would have charged her for the extra seats.
If it was culturally acceptable, they would charge more for heavier people. Without question.
They just need to replace the rows of seats with benches that have sliding armrests. Adjust the armrest to fit and charge by linear displacement.
I’m just imaging the baggage carriers having to throw people on the plane the way they do bags.
“Ugh… We have a code 5. Get the crane and dolly!”
The gate attendants aren't carrying you to your seat. Your baggage on the other hand needs people to carry it and anything ober 50 lbs is a two person lift
Because airline attendants are not literally lifting you up by their bare hands and throwing you into the luggage compartment while you sit there, inert. Or are you? I'm always open to new airline experiences!
I don't know if the following plays into this, but as an aside: Major airlines [are unregulated banks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4) that make their money not primarily off the passengers flying, but off other companies buying their loyalty program bonuses.
Trust me, if they could legally charge you by weight they would be all over that.
I think they can, they just don't want the PR hit. Because that costs money too.
A lot of people would start using that made up word fatphobia.
Fatphobia is real, some people just prefer leaner cuts or chicken breast, don't judge bro
It would have to be an industry wide change. Honestly, they probably should do it.
The lighter people would love not subsidizing the costs for the heavy people I'm sure lol
I would just like to not have to share my seat that I paid for.
They can, but in the US like 70% of the pop is overweight, over 30% are obese. There will be a customer boycott and the bottom line would take a hit.
This is probably a joke, but I'm definitely inclined to believe it's the real answer
Its terrible business. If an airline suddenly came out with that their sales would drop to zero overnight
Not 0. Plenty of us would just on some good deals if they were priced well.
I mean, I know people who would gladly ride an airline where you are guaranteed not to have a fat seatmate.
The baggage handlers union has negotiated these extra fees into the collective bargaining agreement. If the baggage handlers have to carry more than the contracted weight, the airline gets charged a fee/penalty, the airline then passes it onto the customer.
The alternative to that fee/penalty is to assign 2 handlers to move the bag (which is *ideally* the behavior desired by the union, rather than continuing to risk injuring workers and just paying the fines instead), in which case your bag is using up the time of 2 employees instead of 1, therefore costing more money to move your bag. Granted, I definitely can't speak from any experience whether the 2-carrier rule is *actually* obeyed in practice, or whether the employers just eat the penalties instead. That's just how it's supposed to go.
Someone doesn't have to pick up and throw an overweight passenger on top of a pile of other passengers while squatting in a cramped cargo bin.
Airlines can't wait to charge you for your extra bodyweight, they just don't think it'll fly right now.
Don’t they charge you extra on how big you are now? Some larger people are forced to buy two seats aren’t they? Wasn’t there a story where a large woman had to buy two seats, but they weren’t even next to each other?
It's not due to the weight limit of the plane, it's due to the lifting capacity of the workers loading the plane. You can really hurt yourself if you're quickly lifting bags that you're expecting to be around 50lb only to have one come along that's 80 or so.
That’s exactly why. They have a maximum weight, say 100,000 lbs. There is a calculated buffer for humans. For example, let’s say the average weight of passengers is 60,000 lbs. That is really a range between 50,000 and 70,000. With fuel and luggage, we can only go up to like 20,000 lbs. That brings the average to 80,000 lbs but gives us 10,000 lbs of wiggle room for heavy people. If everyone on the plane is overweight, we may get up to 90,000 lbs. Then we have an extra 10,000 lbs just because we never want to be *at* capacity. So, they have to be really strict about the non-human weight in order to keep the buffer intact. Also, as others have said, people have to carry the luggage.
What a bizarre argument. If we go with your example of ~300 passengers, 5 lbs overweight baggage per passenger is just another 1500 pounds, which is insignificant compared to 10k pound buffer. The point that the OP makes and which you missed is that the extra baggage weight is very small compared to human weight variance.
Human weight will average out over 100+ people, the variance of the average is really small. But if they are lax on baggage weight, many people will push the limit and it will have a bigger effect on the overall weight.
Yep. It's not like people will go wild and put on weight before travelling just to stick it up to the airline. Luggage, on the other hand, is very easy to load up. Limits are necessary because people will abuse it otherwise.
Only bizarre if you are incapable of inferring. My numbers are not exact, but the buffer is still equally important.
Because this isn't about the overall weight of the plane but the handling of the luggage.
I have seen reports this week of airlines considering charging customers based on their weight.
Thats why when it is over, I just open my bag and eat 5lbs of clothes. CHECKMATE
It's not a capacity limit on the plane, it's maximum lift weight regulations for the baggage handlers. Most jobs where you lift things have an insurance limit (usually 50lbs solo or 100lbs assisted) and if you injure yourself moving more than that insurance won't cover you.
The baggage weight limit is designed for employees working with luggage, in order to prevent them from straining or otherwise hurting themselves. Your suitcases are fat packs of shit, they're heavy and difficult to load in a confined space.
I once flew in a smaller comercial plane (going to a remote town) and the airhostess had to rearrange some bigger passengers to balance the plane.
Charging extra if a person exceeds x amount, could really motivate people to exercise and regulate obesity problem to some extent.
And, ironically, you can literally give an arm and a leg, that'll lower your body weight by like 30 lbs. Won't matter to the airline. Still gonna get that overweight baggage fee,
In some instances, airlines do charge large people more by making them pay for two seats. But generally, any weight-based pricing approach to passengers themselves would be met with all sorts of outrage alleging the airlines are doing nothing more than fat-shaming in the name of increasing profits.
Passenger and baggage weight totals should be adjusted according. So 120+20 isn’t paying as much as 120+65.
New Zealand wants to start weighing passengers. Right now it's inconspicuous and voluntary but Pandora's box has been opened on a new way to get ripped off
I have often thought this. I should get a petite credit for being under 120 pounds and able to fit between two obese men.
Fleet engineer for one of the big 4 in the US. For everything except people (which is estimated and accounted via seating) any weight addition requires a W&B (weight and balance) report. Last week I had one that accounted for 2 pounds just aft of the wings (ie close to COG) There are the baggage handlers to account for in weight as well as some wiggle room in weight distribution but it is very important outside of just fuel.
If the airlines could get away with charging you more for your weight, they would. They will charge you for an extra seat if you don’t fit in just one.
To be fair, a human carries its own weight onto the plane (usually). Airlines need to pay people to load, screen, and process luggage.
Simple reason. If you take the weight of a couple hundred people on a plane and average it out, and compare this to samples from different flights, it will remain at a fairly consistent average. This average is accounted for in plane ticket prices. Meanwhile, with bags, this is controllable, and if airline didn't control it, they'd know that people would be a lot more limitless with how much they carry, costing the airline a lot more. That, as well as safety reasons relating to bags. Also, human weight isn't exactly controllable in the short term like baggage weight is (emphasis on short term/convenience. Of course I don't mean people can't lose weight), and there'd probably be controversy if airlines charged by the weight of an individual, not to mention the extra costs + inconvenience of weighing everyone etc. So it is merely just averaged out.
So the solution is to eat five lbs of your luggage in front of them when they say it’s overweight
The luggage doesn't sue the airline when they charge it for being overweight
Are you being picked up and placed anywhere by someone? No? You can walk, or maybe mobility reduced and need a wheelchair? You pay extra cause people have to lift your heavy bags. The heavier the bag, the slower the process. So yes you pay more, because they are working harder. Fuck, I hate when you people think you smart, or logical when asking these questions.
It's almost like one is controllable and requires employees to be carrying it.
Maybe we need to start a baggage positivity movement. #allbagsarecarryon
That is such an idiotic take, you can't change your weight in 5 minutes. You can the luggage Besides you're hauling your own ass, but not the luggage. How'd you feel if you were a luggage handler and 200+ people would all bring slightly overweight luggage?
OK I’ve never thought about this before, but now I need to know how the airline calculates how much fuel they need for an aircraft based on who’s flying. Like, if you have a flight with six people on it, and those six people are children, that is very different than if you have a flight with six people and they’re all football linebackers. I figured they calculated those fuel requirement pretty carefully to include luggage, I mean, that’s why they’re wearing it right? When are they wearing us?
They use average weight for an adult. Children have different tickets so they're taken into account. If you buy "adult" tickets but then show up with kids, the check-in or gate agents are supposed to add a code to the passenger manifest noting that those customers are children.
This is why I love Reddit so much, someone will always have an actual legit answer. Which led me down an interesting rabbit hole! Here is an article about how airlines are going to have to calculate new average passenger weights because we're getting bigger and we're carrying more stuff in our pockets, like cell phones. It affects everything including safety plans etc. [https://unitedafa.org/news/2021/6/10/heavier-passengers-on-planes-mean-new-safety-limits-for-airlines](https://unitedafa.org/news/2021/6/10/heavier-passengers-on-planes-mean-new-safety-limits-for-airlines) Here is an article about how the weights are calculated: [https://pilotteacher.com/how-do-airlines-calculate-passenger-weight/](https://pilotteacher.com/how-do-airlines-calculate-passenger-weight/) The most interesting part for me being that the average weights are different in summer and winter, because generally you've got coats and boots vs shorts and flip flops.
one thing is luggage another one are passengers, I don’t undertake OP’s comparison in the first place.
The only reason the weight of a human can vary by a few hundred pounds is there are unhinged people in this world who eat themselves into their grave with complete disregard for everything and everyone around them. Imo airlines should tax obese humans more too
I believe Air New Zealand is weighing passengers (voluntarily) so they can get info on average passenger weight for fuel efficiency
This is precisely why small deviations in luggage get slapped, less surprises with humans and lots of surprises with luggage. luggage can be 2lbs or 200lbs. The overall effect on an airplane can be catastrophic if not controlled. With humans you can plan for a certain weight discrepancy within normal limits.