Air New Zealand Enhances Its Safety Measures By… Weighing Passengers

Before getting onto a flight for your vacation, you might be worried about overpacking as the ground staff takes your luggage for weighing. Air New Zealand is doing a little more than just piling your bags onto the scale; it’s also putting its passengers on it.
 
Now, don’t worry. The idea is not to shame travelers before they jet off on a well-deserved holiday nor to make people pay appropriately for contributing more or less to mass distribution on a plane. Instead, the airline noted that it is weighing people to get real-world information and for safety reasons.
 
Everything gets weighed before taking a flight, including the cargo, the meals, and personal luggage. Mass affects a plane’s speed, cruising altitude, and climb rate. Per NPR, the American Federal Aviation Administration stated that aircraft are always designed to be overloaded when every seat is filled, and so is the cargo. This could lead to issues on long-haul flights.
 
It might make a little more sense from a data collection perspective when put like that. However, stepping onto a scale right before a trip to Hawaii still can’t be that great of a feeling.
 
The airline, however, maintains that nobody will be able to see your information, not even the staff conducting the procedure. Instead, the information will be immediately fed into a computer system and stored anonymously.
 
The weigh-in is set to take place before passengers get to their boarding gate, and if you feel like you can’t handle the notion of stepping on the scale, you’re free to skip it entirely. Ultimately, Air New Zealand hopes to get information from 10,000 passengers.
 
 

[via Interesting Engineering and NPR, cover photo 97153546 © Ryan Fletcher | Dreamstime.com]