Safety board wants airline passengers weighed

CNN ^ | 2/27/04

[hunter112]

I love the idea of pay by the pound.

If they surcharge anything, they ought to surcharge screaming little kids!

It's already degrading enough to fly, what with the strip search, the shoe removal, and the lousy seats, food, service, etc., what's one more insult on the pile?

[nightdriver]

"If the wind is blowing, it will create lift, reducing the weight indicated on the scales."

That certainly is one thing that needs to be taken into consideration. That's why we needed to integrate the readings over a period of time. Lift and rocking certainly happen and the gustier it is the worse it is, but an integrated value is very close and a whole lot better than having nothing.

Just having the pilot and crew aware of the issue does more good than anything else in preventing what happened to this plane in NC.

[finnman69]

How about a BO detector. Extra charges if the smell-a-lator picks up noxious fumes from feet,armpits, or other noxious areas.

[edeal]

Hillary is expecting another child?

[hunter112]

How about a BO detector.

Add perfume excesses to the list, and you're on!

[RocketWolf]

Way- back- when-. I was en route from Keflavik to Souda Bay . On the leg from Rome to Naples on a F 28 a very large lady in the next seat had a mesh bag with several live chickens.

[swarthyguy]

Not far enough.

Tickets should be priced by bodyweight.

Why should I pay for the extra fuel to lift that fattie into the air?

[Myrddin]

I think they already have such devices built into most commercial aircraft. I fly on an Embraer-320 between Pocatello and Salt Lake City. The staff loading the baggage makes repeated trips to the cockpit to verify the weight and balance with the pilots. They move luggage and/or passengers forward as necessary to get it right.

[RatSlayer]

"Years ago, when I worked on the 747 project at Boeing, we put instrumentation on the landing gear to give the pilot gross weight and CG location. But that's sorta expensive."

Yeah, the 747 was the first to have a lot of new safety equipement.

Load sensors are now standard equipment on the heavies and really aren't all that expensive compared to the old days. These days, all the data is displayed on MDUs, you don't need extra displays and since all the data is manipulated by the avionics computers, there's no need for extra processors. And MEMs technology has made the sensors pretty cheap. Nowdays the most expensive part is the few extra lines of code in the avionics computer that collects the raw data, converts it to engineering units and sends it to the MDU to be displayed.

So having load sensors in the tarmac would really only be necessary for the non-heavies. It would be a nice safety feature and probably not too expensive. You'd really only need a couple for each airport since the non-heavies could just taxi over to the sensor and get weighed on their way out to the runway. Heck, you could just have them in the same place that they keep the de-icing equipment and that way they pilots could get weighed and de-iced at the same time.

[traumer]

Embarrassing for some ? Perhaps...

But makes a perfect sense for the safety of the plane.

[nightdriver]

"Heck, you could just have them in the same place that they keep the de-icing equipment and that way they pilots could get weighed and de-iced at the same time."

Sure. I like that even better. The pilot could use it or not use it at his own discretion.