More boneheaded crap from those ever-inventive airlines …
I was recently on a flight where we were reminded numerous times during boarding to sit in our assigned seats only, which had been allocated for reasons of weight and balance.
Umm. How?
Doing something like that properly would require that the airlines know how much each passenger and, even more unlikely, their carry-on luggage weighs. It’s been a long, long time since my hand luggage was checked for size and weight and exactly never outside maybe a doctor’s office since I was. And, in any case, the airlines have already assigned me my seat before they ever had the chance to do either.
Ok, maybe the airlines are doing some sort of rough estimate based on passengers being male or female, children or adults as well as assuming that our carry-on bags all meet both their weight and number restrictions (uh huh …), but is this sufficient for their apparently highly precise calculations that forbid us from swapping seats with someone else? For our own safety no less? What if someone cancels at the last minute or is a no show? Or simply went nuts at duty free? What if the other identical twin wants to look out the window for a bit? Am I inviting disaster simply by walking to the loo for a pee? (I certainly am if I don’t …) Are the flight attendants really allowed to walk around with their carts that much?
Admittedly, some airlines have been weighing both volunteer passengers and their carry-on luggage recently but mostly to get better estimates for these data than the global averages that they currently rely on. Even so, it remains a mystery to me how any airline could apply these data on a day-to-day, flight-to-flight basis to balance out the plane.
Finally and more importantly, most airlines now allow you to pick out your own seat for a fee. How do they control for weight and balance then? Granted, not everyone buys their seat ahead of time but many do. It’s also something that the airlines are increasingly encouraging by tying seat selection to unnecessary upgrades like being able to bring a real piece of carry-on baggage in the cabin or having enough legroom on the odd chance that you’re not a munchkin. And, if enough people do, can the airlines really compensate with the leftover cheapskates for any skewed weight distributions that might have arisen from it? All using data that they don’t have? (Apart from them overwhelmingly being munchkins with personal items only …)
Nah. The only balance here that the airlines really care about is the one in their financial reports …
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