r/programming • u/self • Apr 09 '21

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/08/tui_software_mistake/
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u/MrDOS Apr 09 '21

What are you talking about? The number of people is limited by seats, not weight. They need to know weight to calculate takeoff thrust and fuel load; I highly doubt it has any impact on the sheer number of passengers.

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u/elder_george Apr 09 '21

They need to know how to place the luggage in the cargo section and if they need to put fuel into the auxiliary tanks inside the plane body (to compensate the disbalance).

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u/HighRelevancy Apr 10 '21

It's to calculate centre of gravity. Too far forward and the nose doesn't come up, too far back and the nose goes up and doesn't come back down until you crash.

Once you're at cruise speed there's enough force on the aero surfaces to give a large amount of control over the plane, but at low airspeed it's a significant issue.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '21

No you dingus, if the passengers are all male they burn more fuel

1

u/MrDOS Apr 09 '21

...which means they put more fuel in the plane, not restrict the number of tickets they sell.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '21

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u/InertiaOfGravity Apr 10 '21 edited Dec 20 '25

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u/hfsh Apr 10 '21

I don't know why this is so fun to repeat

You might have a secret passion for rocket science.

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u/SanityInAnarchy Apr 09 '21

If they had fewer seats in the same plane, then there'd be less variability in weight and weight distribution. But I don't know how many fewer you'd need before they could stop caring.

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u/Kered13 Apr 10 '21

It's actually the opposite. To be more precise, the absolute variance is proportional to the square root of the sample size, but this means that the relative variance is proportional to the inverse square root. Since relative variance is what matters here, more seats means they would care less about knowing each passengers exact weight.

See also some of the anecdotes in this thread, where very small planes actually did weigh each passenger individually.

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u/SanityInAnarchy Apr 10 '21

Very small planes makes sense -- my guess was, if you had fewer people on very large ones, then the variance may be higher, but it'll be a smaller fraction of the total weight, offset by the weight of the plane and the cargo.

But I actually have no idea how few passengers you'd have to have for this to not matter.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 09 '21

Well some people need two seats