Originally Posted by
Peter47
The proportion of non binary passengers can't be very high. Treating them all as male (for weight purposes only) shouldn't have any great effect on load sheets
Indeed. My flippant comments about security-airline cooperation aside (surely proposing such an unlikely friendship is clearly humorous
), this is the pragmatic solution.
It's my understanding that some airlines already do this for all passengers. For example, AA (as far as I know still) assumes all passengers are adult male except in situations where W&B is critical and then they start correcting the data for the passenger count and seating to show children and women accurately. For example the MD-80 balance is critical with low passenger counts - adults must be at the front, cargo or bags loaded into the front hold first, or the aircraft might sit on its tail. If any aircraft is near MTOW then correcting some passengers from adult to child might bring the weight down enough to allow an easy flight plan.
So rounding up is already done in many cases, and rounding the weight of some passengers up because their actual M/F weight is not clear from the booking information will only be a minor part of the existing rounding-up being done for convenience.