Reader James dials the U:TB Batphone and tips us off to this fictitious airline’s oddly plausible website: Derrie-Air (har har har), “the world’s only carbon-neutral luxury airline, where you don’t have to choose between living the high life and saving the planet.” Heh. Sounds oddly familiar.
But this make-believe airline’s phony business model relies on a not-necessarily unthinkable concept: Weight-based fares. Not just your luggage, but your person, too.
…the more you weigh, the more you’ll pay. After all, it takes more fuel—more energy—to get more weight from point A to point B. So we will charge passengers based on how much mass they add to the plane. The heavier you and your luggage are, the more trees we’ll plant to make up for the trouble of flying you from place to place.
Cute. But again, is this really unimaginable? It works for the post office, so why not an airline?
Southwest already charges an extra seat for “passengers of size.” (Notably, Canada has banned this practice.) And even hotels have offered weight-based rates.
If you think this isn’t being considered right now by some airlines, think again. But check out the quote from this Bloomberg article, in which the president of Emirates Airlines goes beyond just poo-poo’ing his firm’s likelihood of charging passengers by the pound:
“That is something that when I was a check-in agent in the early 70s I used to do and it was the most horrific experience, trying to get people to stand on scales,” said Tim Clark, the airline president. “It’s not something that we would do.”
Wait a minute — airlines used to weigh passengers? Which airlines? When For how long? And to what end? I can’t seem to find any record of this. My first flight was in 1973, but admittedly I was too young to remember it. Is Mr. Clark referring to weight-and-balance issues for small aircraft, or was there some other reason to put passengers on the scale?
Help me out here. Anyone out there have some memories of getting weighed before a flight?
Related:
- Travel by the pound
- Canada prohibits airlines from charging overweight passengers for an extra seat
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June 9th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
While probably not what you’re looking for, my wife and I were on a flight where we were weighed and assigned to seats a couple years ago when we flew on Scenic Airlines to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon from Vegas. At the check in desk they weighed us with our luggage and then assigned our seats to make sure that the plane was properly balanced and not over its capacity. Our flight back from the Canyon was on a different airline and from a different airstrip which didn’t weigh us. The 2 planes were about the same size and I would guess, about the same vintage.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
For flights on small aircraft, pax and baggage are still weighed, especially for those planes travelling over mountainous regions in thinner air.
Air New Zealand, or TEAL as it was in those days, used to fly Solent flying boats along the Coral Route from New Zealand to the Pacific Islands and to Sydney, Australia. Passengers were weighed for these flights.
Showing my age here, my first flight was as a kid in the 60s – a DC3 from Suva to Nadi in the Fiji Islands. We were all weighed before that flight. I can still remember the big set of scales which held tremendous fascination for us kids whenever we went to the airport.
I also recall being weighed for international flights between Fiji and New Zealand in the late 60s. By the time we immigrated from Fiji to NZ in the mid-70s, the weighing of pax had stopped.
In those days, I think that it had something to do with propeller-driven aircraft vs. jet engine power. With jet engines, there was surplus power with which to take off and not run out of runway!
June 10th, 2008 at 2:07 am
My SO and I were weighed for a (7-passenger) helicopter flight in Alaska a couple of years ago, to determine weight and balance, and were assigned seats on that basis as well.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:34 am
A crash of a regional flight of US Airways from Charlotte, NC in 2003 was blamed among other things to underestimated weight for passengers and their luggage. No surprise with rising waistlines…
See http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2004/AAR0401.htm and http://www.airsafe.com/events/airlines/usair.htm
June 10th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Cape Air (which flies from Boston to nearby beach destinations, and then in the Caribbean in the winter) asks passengers how much they weigh when they check in, for weight-and-balance purposes.
On the last flight I took with them, the plane was full (9 pax); the ground crew specifically pulled the larger guys out of the line and had them board first so they sat closest to the front.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Maybe by eliminating first meals and now even snacks, airlines are actually helping their passengers slim down and eventually save money on air fares.
Claire @ http://travel-babel.blogspot.com
June 10th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I don’t know about air travel, but I think that you should be charged by girth for subway travel during peak periods. It would be easy to implement — have turnstiles of progressively greater widths and correspondingly higher fares, and you pay according to the narrowest one you can squeeze through.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Yeah, this would be fantastic. ::eyeroll:: Will the airlines be sending out free USB-powered electronic scales, so I can be weighed while I buy a ticket? How else will they know what to charge? I don’t see this ever happening, unless they force everyone to buy tickets at the airport. Fat chance.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:16 am
You see people being weighed along with their bags in old movies too (circa 1930s-40s) — I have a scene with Cary Grant in my head
June 11th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I’m fine with this. When skydiving, they have some weight restrictions to if they’ll even let you on the plane, although this is as much to do with if it’s safe to let you rent their chutes as if it’ll unbalance the plane or consume more fuel.
In a country where a large proportion of obese people are so because of their own laziness and negligence, we should have no problem making people pay for the inconvenience their lard causes others. What’s stopping us from this, and other progressive ideas such as making driving exams much harder and keeping smelly people off buses is political correctness. Political correctness is a manifestation of communism that somehow got allowed into a free country.
Let the flaming begin!
June 11th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I was weighed last year on a flight from Lord Howe Island to Port Macquarie. I wasn’t surprised – prop flight over water into head wind and getting towards the range limit.
I was surprised not to be weighed for a similar Chatham Islands flight this year.
I do recall the odd period when airlines have weighed passengers in order to update their standard weight estimates. More recently on Flyer Talk a regular posted about being asked to be weighed for a Hong Kong to Singapore flight
June 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
A few more responses, from the mailbag. The consistent theme is “puddle-jumpers.”
Colleen writes (emphasis added):
Perhaps this is what a weight-based fare system would need to look like today — enter your weight when you book online? Still seems impractical in an age of online check-in and carry-ons.
Ed writes:
That hotel sounds more like an airport locker!
And Elissa writes:
Thanks to everyone for writing in, both via e-mail and in commments! (And Claire, I like the spin you’re using to “justify” the elimination of snacks on board…
)
June 11th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Looks like Tim Clark worked for British Caledonia back in the early 70s.
I lived in the Middle East when I was a kid and I vaguely remember getting weighed on flights in Saudi Arabia.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Which would be around 1978-79…