According to members of a flight crew, on a partially empty aircraft, it is “crucial” that all passengers “retain their assigned seating”, for all-important matters of “weights and balances”.
While the uninitiated might believe they are sat willy-nilly, wherever there is an open spot, it is in fact not so.
Every seat is unique, and its unexpected occupancy can have drastic effects on the aircraft’s actual aerodynamics.
To determine a client’s placement, airline officials have to conduct extremely complex calculations, which involves the derivation of a logarithmic function from the passenger’s passport number, relating this to the distance of Saturn from the company headquarters on the date of their birth, and situating the result within a detailed chart of the neurological activity in a domesticated vegetarian hedgehog’s brain when it reads the passenger’s name.
These are extremely time-consuming operations, which require a vast number of human specialists (as well as a single, extremely busy hedgehog).
In fact, with the cost of such procedures, it is a miracle the airline has the funds to fly any planes at all.
Since it does, and takes every possible measure to respect the privacy of the passengers’ actual weight, its requests to mind one’s seating are not only scientifically backed, they are not to be trifled with.
…unless you miss your plane. Or wish to pay for a seat change.
In those cases – and in those cases only – physics and the several-ton steel airplane have a special arrangement to adjust for the variation in the great aeronautical equilibrium.