Working in the airline industry, I remember reports of US carriers wanting to measure

the weight of passengers not only for weight and balance but as part of fuel conservation
efforts. (While working for South East Asian Airlines), a domestic airline here in the
Philippines that then used 19-seater LET aircraft, passengers were also weighed upon
check-in to maintain weight and balance. A plane carrying a heavier load needs to burn
more fuel in order to arrive at its intended destination on time.

Of course, there are a lot of issues on privacy, human rights et cetera when it comes
to measuring an individual’s weight. I would assume that some passengers will not want
to disclose their actual weight and would want to provide only an estimate. Unless it
becomes a government law that compels passengers to actually step on a weighing
scale, it could be difficult.

There have also been reports that on average, obesity is a major issue America faces
today because the number of overweight Americans has been increasing steadily.

Available Data

• A 1995 FAA advisory states that under existing rules, airlines may either weigh
passengers individually, take their own survey of passenger weights or use the
average weights provided by the FAA advisory. (Take note that it has been 14
years since these average weights were released).

• Average estimate of passenger and carry-on weight; 82kg in the summer and 84
kg in the winter. After doing some research on the internet, this rule applies to
airlines flying small aircraft, particularly those in with 10-19 seats.

• Presumed weight of check-in bags:

12kg for domestic

15kg for international flights

Survey Information

Survey was conducted for 30 days

24 airlines participated in the survey with 30 percent of their routes and 15 percent of
their flights being surveyed

Purpose of the Survey

For the FAA to find out if they need to update the “fudge factor” or buffer currently set at
4.5 kg that a check-in agent adds to the weight of the passenger and his carry-on and
checked baggage. I have assumed that clothes, shoes, accessories including handbags
(considered separate from carry-on baggage) would roughly weigh around 4.5 kg as
opposed to 4.5 kg being the total buffer for the entire flight.

Solution

I. Determine if the samples to be collected are paired or independent

Independent Samples - We are interested in some quantity for each of the two
populations. The population means are µ1 and µ2 with the standard deviations σ1 and σ2.

In paired samples – When samples are paired in a natural way, we analyze the difference
between two separate variables.

Since the FAA did not mandate which of the two methods of data gathering will be used,
airlines can use one of three methods:

1st method = Some airlines will ask the passengers to estimate their body weight and
actually weigh their carry-on and checked baggage

2nd method = Some Airlines will ask passengers to step on the weighing scale in addition
to weighing the carry-on and checked baggage. (How they will get the passengers to do
this will depend on the way they communicate this to passengers without alerting the ire
of human rights groups)

3rd method = For me, this will help to maintain uniformity in data gathering, all
participating airlines will have to ask passengers to first provide an estimate of their
body weight and then actually step on a weighing scale. We would have a somewhat
distorted raw data set if more airlines opted for option 1 against option 2.

To minimize complaints, the airline can explain that this procedure is being conducted to
help the FAA make informed decisions that affect passenger safety during a flight.
Normally, passengers cooperate when their safety and lives are considered to be at risk).

II. Hypothesis Formulation

Assuming we will decide to use Option 3, Let us assume that each sample consists of two
variables: Scaled Weight (SW) and EW (Estimate Weight). The actual number of samples
was not indicated, only that it was conducted for 30 days, so let’s assume that they will
collate the data for each of the survey dates and n could be ≥30. From the Central Limit
theorem, a sample size should at least be n=30 for it to approximated as a normal
distribution.

Let’s assume that our sample size for both n1 (scaled weight) SW and n2 (estimated
weight) EW is n= 50.

H0 SW-EW = 4.5 kg
H1 SW-EW ≠4.5 kg

(I had initially wanted to write this as H1<4.5 kg based on the assumption that the
average weight of American passengers has increased since 1995 but I decided to use
“not equal to” to be on the safe side)

The way the hypothesis statement was formed tells us that this will be a two-tailed test.

III. Conduct a t-test to Test the Difference of the Means

Let D represent the sample mean difference between pairs of SW and EW

Let D0 represent the hypothesized difference or borderline difference between H0 and H1.

No significance level was given, so let’s assume that α = 0.05 with a confidence interval
of 95%.

Using Excel’s TINV function, we can compute for the value of t

T = TINV (0.025, 98)

Where, 0.025 is our α = 0.05/ 2

98 = n1+n2 – 2 = 50+50-2

T = 2.27 (since our hypothesis test is two-tailed, the acceptance region will fall between
-2.27 and +2.27).

IV. Compare the computed T-value of α against the t-value of the difference between
means using the formula once we have the values of D, D0 and Sd:

T-value =

The t-value of the difference between the means, must fall within -2.27 to +2.27 for us
to accept that

H0 SW-EW = 4.5 kg. If the t-value of the statistic is less than -2.27 or greater than +2.27,
then we reject the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative, where SW-EW ≠4.5 kg.