Why are we still doing weight and power by hand?

Weight and power if you’ve never heard of it, or in other parlance, weight and balance is a crucial set of calculations for safety of flight. Having the numbers wrong could be the difference between life or death. Where I work, it involves interpreting various charts and tables and hand jamming numbers into a calculator and penciling in over fifty blanks on a paper form. It takes anywhere from 10 to 15 mins on average to do depending on experience. Time that can be better spent with other aspects of flight planning. So why do we have humans do the calculations when a computer can do it faster and more accurately?

The explanation you’re likely to hear is that it’s because “we’ve always done it that way” or “it’s important to know how to do the calculations.” I’d only begin to accept the later, but it’s still a bad explanation. Sure there’s some merit to knowing how to do it by hand. After all, you may have to do it on the fly or somewhere you don’t have a computer. But the reality is, these situations are far from the norm.

A good solution would be to have one day out of the week for pilots to do it by hand and the rest of the week the computer does it. Sure the software would have to be written, but it’d be close to trivial. Let’s do the math. On average, we schedule 4 flights a day. Let’s go with the low end of 10 minutes to hand jam the numbers. Spread that over 5 days a week and 50 fly weeks a year, that’s 167 hrs. If you go with the high end of 15 min, that’s 250 hrs. Pilots get paid on average $60/hr. That comes out to $10,000 to $15,000/yr of human capital wasted on an easily automated task. I’d write the software myself for far less. It’s 2019, let’s start acting like it.