An exciting trip may turn into an embarrassing one if someone asks you to weigh yourself when you reach the airport. Yes, you heard it right!
Finland's largest airline Finnair has recently announced that it will weigh passengers before they board.
"Airlines know what the aircraft weighs, what the check-in luggage weighs, but not what passengers weigh," Päivyt Tallqvist, communications director at Finnair, told BBC.
It is, however, a voluntary scheme and passengers who don't want to do it are still allowed to fly. It is being done to gather data on passengers' weight and to see if the estimates they're currently using to calculate fuel and safety are accurate.
A spokesperson for the airline told the Independent: "We have a strong safety culture at Finnair, and we are also very data-driven, so we want to ensure we have the best possible data for use in aircraft performance and loading calculations."
Finnair will need 2,000 volunteers in order to get an accurate read on passenger weights and their carry-on bags. So far, 180 passengers have volunteered to weigh in along with their carry-on luggage, a representative told the BBC.
The study will be continuing till spring 2018. The aim of the weigh-ins is to update nearly decade-old data on average passenger weights.
The airline said it is using European Aviation Safety Agency data from 2009 like most airlines. The data lists the standard weight including carry-on luggage.
For a male passenger, it is 88 kilograms (194 pounds), 70 kilograms (154 pounds) for a female passenger and 35 kilograms (77 pounds) for a child.
A Finnair representative said: "Now we feel it is time to update the data, as our traffic has developed and grown a lot."
He added: "We have a very international customer base, as many of our customers transfer with us between Europe and Asia, and then we have our domestic traffic as well."
