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Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

theguardian.com

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Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#11

Post by adaml_623 »

tdeck wrote: post #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?

I guess System #1 isn't properly integrated into System #2 because the development is being undertaken by off-shored teams who don't understand the business domain.

Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#12

Post by mogoman »

wombatmobile wrote: post #2

I'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…

My dad mentioned to me once that back in the early days of commercial flying each passenger was weighed with their luggage

Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#13

Post by akadruid1 »

londons_explore wrote: post #6

It'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…

This wasn't a safety issue because the aircraft was overloaded, article doesn't mention it being over max takeoff weight or even if it had enough fuel loaded, it was specifically the thrust settings on take off which doesn't really impact airline bottom line. Weighing the plane does seem like the answer.

Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#14

Post by chuckleMuscle »

adaml_623 wrote: post #10

Official 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…

Link seems to be dead, but doc is available here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/604f423be90e0...

Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#15

Post by cafard »

Back in the 1980s, quite a few American soldiers were killed when a chartered flight crashed in (I think) Newfoundland. It came out that the airline had reckoned 160 lb per person, which may be OK for the general population, but not for the airborne infantry.

Re: Plane in 'serious incident’ after every Miss on board assigned child’s weight

#17

Post by jmchuster »

tdeck wrote: post #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?

With the amazing solution being

> The operator subsequently introduced manual checks to ensure adult females were referred to as Ms on relevant documentation.

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