The telly reported that a woman is suing an airline because they made her buy two airplane tickets. Discrimination against the fat, I guess.
Hoz about changing the fares so that you are charged by your poundage, say 5 cents a pound?
Aren’t the fares influenced by the cost of fuel? It would cost more to fly a fat person, and if you weigh 125 pounds, maybe you’d get a heck of a price break.
Seems that this approach would put a stop to lawsuits of this nature.
Well, I don’t know about discrimination on this one.
If someone’s big enough to take two seats, the second seat being one that another paying customer could be using, I think the airline should be able to recoup that loss. If, that is, the flight is full. The airline is not responsible for the size of their passengers.
Assuming that the number and size of seats remains the same, most people will be in a fairly similar weight range, so it’s only a minority for whom this is an issue.
You would need to have up-to-date weight measurements for every passenger at every booking office and travel agent (“yes sir, I’m sure you are only seven stone”). You would run the risk of legal action from customers who feel that the process is mocking them or “discriminating” against them (regardless of the facts, I’m sure someone would dive in there with a lawsuit or two).
Well, Mr. Cynical has a point, but how about people that DO fit in a regular seat? Personally I think the idea of charging by passenger weight is ludicrous. I mean, come on: how much does a Boeing 747 weigh, and what difference would it make if all passengers were 20% heavier all of a sudden? I’d say the total weight increase is still rather marginal.
We COULD, however, come up with a system of charging people per IQ point. I’m sure Lindsay would travel quite cheaply 
Well, I’ve always sorta hoped they’d do a surcharge of, say, $20 on anyone who would be sort of spilling over into the space of the person next to them… and then give that $20 to the passenger who lost the elbow room. That would also have to kick in for people who have a small child on their lap, or very long legs or arms.
However, the way they size those plane seats these days? I’m damn close to getting a surcharge slapped on me.
Coldfire sez:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Don’t they have weight requirements for luggage?
How bout a combined passenger+luggage weight limit?
No Dinsdale, no!
Then you’d have some of the heaviest people packing (by necessity) some of the skimpiest clothes to wear on vacation. You wanna stroll through Dollywood surrounded by hefty people in short shorts and mesh tanks?
ROFLMAO 
Cut me, I bleed. Guess you sure told me.
Tom Leykis gives out this option on his radio show, in his response to a discrimination lawsuit, and his callers say it is a good idea.
Tom said the airline could have scales at the airport.
One caller told him that the flight for her and her husband was $200. something but for their infant the ticket was over $350.00, so she would have saved money.
What is with the comment on IQ?
Yes, weight is directly related to fuel (ergo flight) costs. Also, the cargo weight is a critical factor regardless of the much greater proportional weight of the plane. The aircraft is designed to operate efficiently within a performance curve. As long as it remains within the engineered performance curve weight makes a negligible difference, on the order of less than a $100. The real question arises in a overloaded plane, once it deviates from the ideal envelope the fuel and speed costs increase exponentially. The fact of the matter is that luggage weight varies at a much greater range than do passenger weight. Theoretically the cost of the flight should be curved based on weight of luggage, as it is they weigh it all and calculate the total for flight calculations. The problem is that the accounting involved in weighing all cargo would cost far more than the cost benefit to the airline and that would be passed on to the customer. So even if you were a 98 pound waif with only a grocery bag containing a spare pair of panties for luggage, you’d still pay more on a graduated scale than you do now because of the need to distribute the cost of the process. The final flaw in the logic is that airfares are necessarily set weeks and months in advance, this makes a sliding price structure very very complicated involving a two step billing process, once when you book and a second refund/surcharge on boarding. The short of it, the weight variation and cost-benefit is far to small to ever consider this technically speaking.
Civil rights issues are a whole 'nother animal.
On the other hand, small commuters and large military aircraft do dynamically weigh passengers and customize the flights accordingly. Military obviously doesn’t have passenger fares, but I imagine they fuel aircraft according. Small charters, single engine props especially do weigh you before getting on and frequently turn away overweight people for saftey reasons. Unless of course that pony up enough dough to kick off the rest of the customers. Some planes can only cary 500 lbs in passengers and cargo, so if you weigh 350 lbs and have a bunch of laggage you’ll probably need to buy 4 tickets and hope its a short trip and the fuel will fit.
Well, thank you. Tom and his listeners thought it a good idea, mostly because they had had to sit next to a very overweight person and were not pleased to have the person’s sweaty arm dripping onto them.
Yech!
Oh, I forgot, I have no IQ points, I have no right to live.
You bet your sweet bippy.
I recall, for instance, being on a KC-135 about to take a jaunt across the pond from Delaware to Italy. The flight was delayed while the engines burned of excess fues, because we were overweight, considering the amount of fuel necessary to keep about 6 F-16’s airborne actoss the Atlantic. This makes me believe that the pilot knows the ground weight of the aircraft, possibly from measurement equipment attached to the landing gear.
Relax already lindsay, I was merely joking. You seem like a clever girl, so I thought you’d get it
Airline seat widths were directly measured recently in a column I read recently in the paper. In coach, the average seat width is - get this - only 17-18 inches! No wonder it feels like you and your seat-neighbors are oozing out of your respective seats! It’s better in first class of course - average seat width 25-30 inches. You know, because they’re better than us. voice drips acid I’m 6’5" (1.96 m) tall and weigh 250# (113.6 kg) or so, and I fly a lot (college commute) and this never fails to tick me off.
Ok. What are those green things in the post and could I add one to my postings? If so, how?
Lindsay read the smilies page.
As far as weighing people it is just not viable for many reasons but also think that today no two people pay the same fare. I always find out the other people on my flight have all paid more than I have. So introducing weight is just going to complicate things.
But if you need two seats or if you need first class wider seat because you are fat then you pay for it. That is not discrimination, that is paying for what you get.
mattk wrote:
They still use “stone” for weight? Is that some British thing?
<tracer whips out his handy dandy weights-and-measures conversion chart>
Hmmm … it says here 1 stone is 14 pounds avoirdupois. So that means 7 stone would be … 98 pounds! Aha! So this is where the phrase “98 pound weakling” comes from!
I dunno how this would work. Do we weigh the passengers before or after they’ve eaten?
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_144.html