I don’t fly THAT much, and this only happened once, but the pilot - before take off - basically came on the intercom and said.
“Yeah folks, we are getting an indication up here that four passengers still haven’t fastened their seatbelts. Please fasten them so we can take off.”.
I think he gave the number, but am not 100% sure.
Again - only heard this once, while I think almost very time I have seen the flight attendents do a walk thru looking to see if they have been fastened. If they can tell in the cockpit - don’t really see the need for doing that. Of course it could vary from plane to plane.
Don’t remember the plane type, but it was - you know - a big one
If you think it through, it is a bit of a magic trick. The pilot can say any reasonable number, because you can only verify yourself and those next to you.
To put it another way, you can only answer “Oh thats me. How embarrassing” or “Nope, mine is fastened. I wish those four jerks would hurry up.”
You have no idea if the number is really zero, nor does the pilot.
No there is no cockpit indication for seat belts or phones (though you might hear interference from phones over the intercom). Given that pilots generally don’t have time for random PAs, I can only assume that the flight attendants had problems with some passengers and asked the pilot to tactfully intervene.
I know that the Star Tours ride at Disneyland has a system to check if seatbelts are fastened, but it doesn’t have weight restrictions (you know, repulsorlifts and nuclear power ;))
Well it wouldn’t be hard to put a weight sensor in the seat (nothing but a human should be in there for takeoff and landing anyway) and a sensor in the belt to see if its buckled. If there is weight in the seat, the belt should be buckled. No weight, it doesn’t matter. That’s pretty basic engineering.
But I’ve never seen any indication that those sensors exist - and I’d guess that with all the things that they NEED to keep repaired on an aircraft - and how abused the seats are, the priority to making sure seat and seatbelt sensors are operational would be really low and has therefore, not be worth the effort.
My car has a sensor in the buckle. You can tell because it’s covered with molded plastic and if you check under the seat where it fastens, you can see a wire coming out.
Every seat belt I’ve seen on a plane is the basic, original style lap belt, with nothing but canvas and a metal buckle. You can inspect it pretty thoroughly and see that there is no sensor anywhere.
So my guess is the attendant did a walk through, and told the pilot there were stubborn people who wouldn’t buckle, and hence the announcement.
No. No sensors for the belts. It adds weight, and you are already required to have the FA’s, so you might as well have them walking the isle and checking visually. The FA may inform the pilot if she notices more than one non-complier, or someone who her biases and experience tell her will perhaps put up a fuss. As each one she speaks to individually costs some time, and has the potential to escalate.
There is a lot of crash testing that goes on with the seats and seat belts, and all that needs to be repeated if change much of anything. This is why the tab and manual length adjustment buckle system on the belts looks like it came straight out of the 1960s…because it did.
Yes. They push the nose over abruptly and listen for the sound of heads hitting the cabin roof. It takes some practice but a good pilot can can discriminate up to ten individual hits.
Whether it’s done or not, I can’t say, but it’s certainly possible.
My car can sense the weight of a person in the passenger seat and sense if the belt is buckled, and dings if a seat is occupied but unbuckled. There’s no technical reason (other than expense) that you couldn’t have such sensors in every seat on a plane, have a computer poll those sensors and then display a number in the cockpit indicating occupied seats that aren’t buckled.
As others have said, it’s unlikely that they actually do this, but it’s not technically impossible.
Well… because it is a large metal tube that hurtles through the air about 30,000 feet above the ground and every added electrical device is also an added potential for something to go wrong. I personally would rather authorized flight attendants to smack passengers around with large dead fish than see them connect a seat belt harness into the plane’s electrical system and add that to the maintenance cycle.
It’s probably the same machine they use to detect iPods that are still on, which the flight attendant used on my last flight.
No, of course they can’t really tell. It’s just a bit of psychology/fun. Yes, it’s perfectly feasible to hook up sensors if they really wanted to, but there’s no way an airline would sink that much money and weight into such a trivial thing. Has anyone here ever LOOKED at an airline seat? Those things are built incredibly cheaply. They’ve cut every corner they can find.
