a question i am asking from a place of total ignorance and curiosity: do commercial airlines vary the amount of fuel they take based on the total weight of the boarded flight and expected distance?
yes, this is a really important factor in the pre-flight calculations and getting it even a few % off can have serious consequences
@whitequark @aeva @gsuberland what i'm more curious about is if they use counts of pax/bags or if they use some kind of sensors in the landing gear to get actual weight.
When you're flying little single engine stuff it's common to actually weigh everyone and bags to make sure you're not too unbalanced
@azonenberg @whitequark @aeva @gsuberland I have had a flight tell passengers (after boarding) that they were going to offload some luggage for weight reasons so they do have sensors as well, apparently.
@wronglang @azonenberg @whitequark @aeva it's measured at check-in. they were probably offloading because they sold based on median luggage weight and your flight happened to be an outlier on what people actually arrived with.
@wronglang @azonenberg @whitequark @aeva like the baggage allowance is 23kg or whatever but they assume the average bag on any given flight is lighter than that 'cos designing the limits around the upper bound is inefficient. if everyone shows up with 21-23kg bags then it's too much, but that's really rare.
@gsuberland @azonenberg @whitequark @aeva huh, I would've assumed they'd do that before boarding but 🤷
@wronglang @azonenberg @whitequark @aeva they don't usually finish loading bags until they're already boarding. plus until everyone's boarded you don't know how many people no-showed.
@gsuberland @azonenberg @whitequark @aeva yeah that makes sense, funny to have just inferred that wrong
