By government edict, Air New Zealand is weighing passengers before they board airplanes.
The country’s civil aviation agency is collecting data on average passenger weights (see story here). It will be used to figure out “weight load and distribution for planes.”
“We weigh everything that goes on the aircraft – from the cargo to the meals onboard, to the luggage in the hold,” Alastair James, the airline’s load control improvement specialist, said.
You may have read stories about planes crashing because of load imbalances. Too much weight forward, the nose goes down; too much in back, the tail drags on the runway or — potentially — flips the plane into a backward somersault.
So, if you’ve been eating too much, you have to sit in the middle of the plane, over the wing struts, so you don’t crash the sucker.
You don’t want that to happen, do you?
