Saturday 10 April 2021

Air Intelligence?

It doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. A Tui Boeing 737 flight from Birmingham to Majorca, was involved in a 'serious incident'. Its pilot was wrongly informed about the weight of his aircraft (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/tui-plane-serious-incident-every-miss-on-board-child-weight-birmingham-majorca). Tui had, over the pandemic, made changes to its aircraft software. The software was programmed to classify anyone with the prefix 'Miss' as a child (allocation 35kg) and anyone with the prefix 'Ms' as an adult (allocation 68kg). Lots of the 'Misses' on the passenger list were actually adults. The pilot was informed his aircraft was 1,200kg lighter than was actually the case. Consequently, the thrust he selected proved inadequate for take-off. Two other Tui flights also registered a similar error but the values were less extreme. You would think that weight wouldn't be entirely based on a prefix. I wonder what weight they allocate for 'Prof'?

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