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posted by martyb on Sunday July 02 2017, @05:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the dicey-analysis dept.

Passengers have more chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot than being allocated middle seats at random on a Ryanair flight, according to new Oxford University analysis.

In recent weeks Ryanair have faced mounting customer criticism, with some accusing the airline of splitting up groups and families, who do not pay an additional charge for reserved seating. These claims have been rejected by the airline which says that customers who do not wish to pay for their preferred seat are randomly allocated one, free of charge.

Last night, the BBC Consumer affairs programme, Watchdog, ran its own investigation to test how random the airline's seating algorithm is.

As part of their tests, groups of four people were sent on four separate Ryanair flights. In each instance every single person was allocated a middle seat. Dr Jennifer Rogers, Director of the new Oxford University Statistical Consultancy was then invited to analyse the data, to work-out the chances of every person getting a middle seat allocated randomly.

By looking at the amount of window, aisle and middle seating available on each flight, at the time of check-in, Dr Rogers, calculated the chances of all four people being randomly given middle seats on each of the flights, to be around 1:540,000,000. The chances of winning the National Lottery jackpot are 1:45,000,000. (This means that you are 10 times more likely to win the lottery than be in a group who are all randomly allocated middle seats.)

Source: Oxford University


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 02 2017, @08:47PM (6 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 02 2017, @08:47PM (#534243) Journal

    But the sentence I quoted says the exact opposite: That they virtually never stick you in the worst kind.

    If it is intended to be a joke, it's a very strange joke indeed.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 02 2017, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 02 2017, @10:46PM (#534276)

    But the sentence I quoted ...

    That dead horse is dead.

  • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday July 02 2017, @10:55PM (4 children)

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Sunday July 02 2017, @10:55PM (#534279) Journal

    No... It's an if:then statement. IF the seating is random, THEN several groups of 4 people all getting middle seats would be extremely rare. The fact that their volunteers were all given middle seats therefore indicates that seating is not random.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:42AM (#534368)

      That only holds as long as you assume either an infinitely large plane or that nobody is willing to pay extra for an aisle or window seat.

    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday July 03 2017, @09:17AM (2 children)

      by Wootery (2341) on Monday July 03 2017, @09:17AM (#534385)

      You're ignoring that some people pay to reserve a seat, and out of these people, probably none of them reserve a middle seat. So if you're randomly assigned one of the 'leftover' seats, odds are pretty good it'll be a middle seat.

      This has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 03 2017, @02:56PM (1 child)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday July 03 2017, @02:56PM (#534447) Journal

        From the summary:

        By looking at the amount of window, aisle and middle seating available on each flight, at the time of check-in, Dr Rogers, calculated

        In other words, they took into account the fact that many people had already reserved aisle and window seats, but at the time of check-in given the mixture of seats still left "available," they were still disproportionately assigned middle seats in a fashion that was decidedly non-random.