The Legend of GERTI's Gold (Cabin Pressure SPOILERS)
Be advised: there are spoilers for ‘Zurich’ below. Also: Math.
Upon hearing the Cabin Pressure Finale, the only real question in my mind was “how much money did they actually get?” It was trickier to answer than I’d hoped, but I believe I have finally calculated a back-of-the-envelope/order of magnitude estimation. All figures are rough guesses, but I think we get a decent sense of the scale of their windfall, at least.
Based on several fan guesses as to what real plane best approximates GERTI, she weighs (normally) 10,000 KG (plus or minus, of course).
The only place I could find weight of wiring estimates puts it at roughly 1-2% of a plane’s weight in general. So call it 1.5%.
GERTI (normally) has 150 KG of copper wiring (I’ve discounted the weight of insulation entirely).
To convert copper to gold, multiply by the ratio of their densities (making sure to keep the units consistent):
19,300 Kg/m^3 / 8960 Kg/m^3 = 2.15
150kg * 2.15 = 323kg
The Cabin Pressure Crew own 323kg of Gold and GERTI is always 173kg overweight (that’s 380 pounds overweight to Americans). I really don’t know how much more balky that would make a plane, but it’s 1.7% of the plane’s total weight.
Current price of Gold is 37339.72 Dollars per Kilogram.
Carolyn now has just over 12 million dollars (7.7 million pounds). That is a lot of lemons.
