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3 November 1999
Portly
passengers
Pay by the pound
By Terry Riley
OK, I give. After recently sharing an airline seat—and I mean sharing—with
one extremely portly passenger, I must finally weigh in on the issue of flying fatties.
I’m sure that it was more uncomfortable for my corpulent companion than it was
for me to be jammed into a mini-seat on a (mercifully) two-hour flight.
His cheeks oozed under the toothpick-sized armrest that separated us (yes, those
cheeks) while his rotund abdomen threatened to break free of his seat belt at any moment
and come spilling onto my pretzels.
It was a ride that both of us would have just as soon avoided, and we were delighted
when we were finally freed from our aluminum confinement.
I bid adieu to my sizable seatmate and thought little of the matter until last week
when I was air shipping a package to Scotland. As best as I can figure, for that shipment
I paid an amount based on four factors: Distance, dimensions, weight, and delivery
time—the most salient attribute contributing to the cost of shipping the package
being its weight.
Because the cost of putting an airplane in the sky and keeping it there until it
reaches its destination is directly proportional to the weight of the craft, this makes
perfect sense.
Then it hit me like a side order of fries.
Why don’t airlines base fares on passenger weight? What could be more reasonable?
Would this be discrimination? Absolutely. The more weight a passenger were to pack on
board—whether in his luggage or in his trousers—the more he would pay.
Would this unfair? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t matter if the passenger were brown
or white or black or green. It wouldn’t matter if the passenger were a man or a woman
or something in between. It wouldn’t matter if the passenger were Muslim or Hindu or
Christian or Jew. It wouldn’t matter if the passenger were Filipino or Canadian or
African or Eskimo. It wouldn’t matter if the passenger were twenty or forty or eighty
or two.
Here’s the formula airlines could use to set their fares:
Ticket price = F + D(WP + ½ WL) + POD + PSLK + PBO where F is a number that reflects
a portion of the fixed costs of running an airline (e.g., advertising, telephones, paper
clips, fat executive salaries). D is distance. WP is the weight of a passenger and his
carry-on bags. WL is the weight of a passenger’s checked luggage. P stands for
“penalty” for obnoxious drunks, screaming little brats, and people with BO.
Now the other side of the fare issue. Because weighty passengers would pay more for a
ticket, they should receive more space on board—wider seats, more legroom. Again,
this only makes sense: Big guys, big fares, big seats; small guys, small fares, small
seats.
If you have a better, more fair-minded formula, I’d like to know about it. Send
it to me. But please, no letters from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or the International Size Acceptance Association.
Don’t write to me about being insensitive to the plight of the pudgy and how my
solution to alleviating the flying sardine issue just adds to the embarrassment of those
who are gravity challenged.
A weight-based fare is, well... fair, and it isn’t going to reveal anything about
our oversized fellow travelers that our eyes aren’t already reporting.
© 1999 Applied Psychology
Related Err Travel columns:
Berrly flying
- A part of nude history
Save me a seat - Seat-saver tactics
... and from Travel Fox:
Texas to get first
non-fat airline - The pudgy will be prohibited
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