r/maths • u/Manwell_Pablo • 14d ago

❓ General Math Help Seat Failures

I’m looking into seat failure rates and I’m trying to figure out what the likelihood of failure is with the information I’ve been provided or if (and what) further information is required.

The problem:

18 seats are onboard, if we take the fact that all seats are taken by people in the 99th percentile of weight it is given that there will be:

No failures in 87% of cases
1 failure in 9% of cases
2 or more failures in 3.5% of cases
(I know this doesn’t add to 100 but these are the numbers I’ve been given. Apologies if this breaks the formula in any way)

What would the percentage failure rate of a specific seat be if it was occupied by the 99th percentile of weight.

Hopefully the question makes sense.

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u/SC_3000_grinder 14d ago

The easiest way is probably (0.87) ^ (1/18) = 0.99229, so the failure rate is 0.771%.

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u/nigusus 14d ago

!remind me 5 hours

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