In the future, every airline passenger will be weighed: that is the claim of a British technology company which is seeking to reduce the amount of fuel burnt by jet aircraft.
As The Independent has reported previously, weighing every passenger before a flight can increase safety and cut the environmental harm caused by each flight.
At present, airlines use “assumed mass” – estimating the total weight of the passengers by using set figures. Typically each passenger is assumed to weigh 88kg.
Airlines may use gender to refine this figure, allowing 93kg for men and 75kg for women.
But unless there is a particular reason for a disproportionately higher weight, the estimates are typically significantly higher than the reality. If the captain knows the plane is carrying less weight than the “assumed mass’, he or she can load a little less fuel, which in turn uses less fuel to carry.
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Furthermore, passengers can be assigned seats depending on their weight in order to balance the aircraft correctly so that it does not need any additional trim.
Passengers are very rarely weighed before a flight; the few exceptions are for small aircraft, where the weight of travellers and the balance of the aircraft are safety-critical.
While airlines stand to benefit from knowing the total weight, until now they…
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