Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#2I'm surprised there isn't a process to establish actual weight of the human payload before takeoff, such as
1. Weighbridges
2. Automatically weighing passengers at the boarding gate
3. Asking passengers to write their weight at check-in
4. Scales built in to wheel struts
Whilst this might not often be a safety issue of the kind exhibited in the article, knowing the actual weight might be cost effective because it would enable airlines to more accurately tune fuel and freight components, which are significant cost and revenue centres respectively.
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#3Title gore. "A software mistake caused a Tui flight to take off heavier than expected as female passengers using the title “Miss” were classified as children, an investigation has found."
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#4I'm surprised there isn't a process to establish actual weight of the human payload before takeoff, such as 1. Weighbridges 2. Automatically weighing passengers at the boarding gate 3. Asking passengers to write their weight at check-in 4. Scales built in to wheel struts Whilst this might not often be a safety issue of the kind exhibited in the article, knowing the actual weight might be cost effective because it wou…
Except maybe airlines don't want people to know how good they've gotten at, shall we say, "skirting the margins", in an effort to cut costs.
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#5> It was programmed in an unnamed foreign country where the title “Miss” is used for a child and “Ms” for an adult female.
This feels like a requirements problem, more than an inadvertent bug. It makes me wonder why someone would decide to guess age (and thus weight) based on the name string alone. Don't the airlines usually have the birthdates of passengers anyway?
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#6It's fine for a an airline to be estimating weights ahead of time with this kind of approximate model, but the final check that the craft is within the safety envelope should be done by weight sensors on the wheels...
Allowing the use of approximate models leads to airlines trying to push the boundaries to earn more profits (when paid per kilo for cargo, an overloaded plane is more profitable than a correctly loaded one).
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#7I'm surprised there isn't a process to establish actual weight of the human payload before takeoff, such as 1. Weighbridges 2. Automatically weighing passengers at the boarding gate 3. Asking passengers to write their weight at check-in 4. Scales built in to wheel struts Whilst this might not often be a safety issue of the kind exhibited in the article, knowing the actual weight might be cost effective because it wou…
On small planes the pilot will personally witness the weighing of each passenger and then decide which seat "Miss Too-Much-Pizza" will be sitting in...
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#8It's fine for a an airline to be estimating weights ahead of time with this kind of approximate model, but the final check that the craft is within the safety envelope should be done by weight sensors on the wheels... Allowing the use of approximate models leads to airlines trying to push the boundaries to earn more profits (when paid per kilo for cargo, an overloaded plane is more profitable than a correctly loaded…
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Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#9Very clickbaity title. It may technically be a serious incident wrt the AAIB, but the sum-up is:
“ Despite the issue, the thrust used for the departure from Birmingham on 21 July 2020 was only “marginally less” than it should have been, and the “safe operation of the aircraft was not compromised”, the AAIB said.”
Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight
#10Official report and link to PDF here: https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aaib-investigation-to-boeing...
The PDF isn't long and is worth a read if you're interested in learning from other peoples mistakes. Of note is that the issue was known and there was a manual workaround that was not used for that flight because the team doing it didn't work on a weekend.
Reading the document it looks like the manual workaround was then implemented into software. This hack just masks the underlying problem rather than providing a robust solution.