This isn’t new in the airline world.
I believe there is a Tongan airline that has been doing it for a few years already
Just weigh and charge people with their baggage. Privacy and embarrassment about mass can be blamed on the bag.
“I guess I shouldn’t have brought my 50kg tote.”
- Laura, size 5xl
Not everybody checks bags tho
Everybody has at least some kind of carry-on. And if not, it would at least be cheaper.
But the things that are priced when overweight are only checked bags, no? Or also carry on bags?
Right now, yeah. But things could change if they’re considering weighing passengers. It makes sense to charge a fixed price for the staff, time, seat, and booking, and a variable price for the fuel (based on mass, distance, wind, and current fuel costs).
Some passengers might have double my mass and should pay more. Children could cost a bit less this way too.
I’m not overweight, I just have really heavy clothes.
That is so racist against Americans, lol
They weigh my carry on and complain when it’s 1kg over, yet some people weighing twice as much as me get on the plane. Makes no sense.
Your fellow passenger will be in a seat, not the overhead baggage compartment.
There isn’t a weight limit for the overhead compartment on any airline I’ve flown.
you sure about that? if they enforce bag weight they won’t need to put max weight stickers in the actual plane. It’s not like anyone would humor them if there were anyways…
There is you just never hit it.
Yeah but I can as easily put 8kg overhead as I can 7kg. The staff won’t have to do it.
If they put the limit at 8kg you would make the same argument about 9.
I’m not saying they’re not rent seeking, I trust them as far as I could throw them, but this is a false comparison. The weight limit of the overhead compartment and the total passenger weight of the plane are two completely different things.
Limiting the carry on weight I can understand. The overhead compartment can only hold a certain amount of weight. So a limit has to exist.
And there is the danger of luggage falling on people during an emergency or even just when opening the compartment. And while 7kg hurts, more weight hurts more and even will get dangerous.
The fellow passenger will be spread across two seats.
That weight limit is how much an employee can lift by themselves in America(50 pounds). If it’s over they have to team lift.
Yeah, that’s why I watch the bag handlers sling my bags with heavy tags on to the conveyor belt with one arm…
Sure, for checked luggage. But why does carry on luggage have to be 7kg?
So it’s doesn’t fall out and crush you in the head during turbulence. It’s held up there by a shitty little latch.
Sometimes the passenger can’t lift it for whatever reason, in which case the flight attendants would have to do it.
Then they should put a barbell with weights and you are allowed to bring as many kgs as you can lift with the barbell.
This will add a new terror to air travel
It’s a slippery slope. Soon they’ll have two separate queues, and one of them will be called “fatties”.
It’s a slope I’m willing to slide down.
Until you get stuck on the sides, yeah
Make them walk through a narrow gate to see how many seats they need to buy.
And this is how humans evolved to have whiskers.
The “GLP-1 queue” & the “Non-GLP-1 queue”.
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I mean they do need to balance the plane so it makes sense, another thing they could do is eliminate first class seats and spread the seating out a little more so they can relocate passengers easier.
I’m not ok with it but I think airlines should make bigger seats available. make it an option to book these chairs , no weighting needed, but I rather pay for a bigger seat than book 2 seats and the 2 seats not honoured when boarding the plane.
You mean like economy+, business or first class seats? Those already exist
The reason for the weight check is to balance out the plane to save kerosene.
On September 16, it became evident that airlines were becoming more interested in passengers’ weight. Prominent carriers like Korean Air and Air New Zealand introduced a rather unconventional rule, requiring passengers to step on scales before boarding their flights. […] This novel approach in the aviation industry has gained momentum, with the objective of maintaining optimal aircraft weight and thereby reducing fuel consumption. The primary goal of this unconventional procedure is to precisely determine the standard weight of passengers and averages. This, in turn, aids in accurately calculating the distribution of weight on the aircraft, resulting in fuel savings. […] The ultimate objective is to ensure that each flight adheres to strict parameters set by the maximum take-off weight of the aircraft, thereby enhancing safety. However, for many, this emphasis on safety might feel like an intrusion into their privacy.
I didn’t know that this was a factor that they needed to consider. The privacy aspect is real, and we need regulations on storage and deletion of this data after each flight. I can already see this info being sold to advertisers.
On the discomfort side, couldn’t they have the collection and recording happen in the background? If no other passengers or staff can see the numbers, there’s less of a chance of someone feeling uncomfortable with the process.
This is all assuming that this is actually necessary or helpful.
They’re not weighing every passenger forever. They just want to get reliable stats on the average per passenger.
The article states that the information will be kept private.
On the discomfort side, couldn’t they have the collection and recording happen in the background? If no other passengers or staff can see the numbers, there’s less of a chance of someone feeling uncomfortable with the process.
The weighing process involves humans, so that wouldn’t be possible.
Their average intelligence being what it is, when instructed to have one person on the scale, sometimes it’s one, sometimes two, sometimes two and a stroller. Sometimes somehow a horse ends up on the scale and no one really understands how, including that horse.
Unless you check the weight, you don’t know what exactly was weighed.
i mean, if theres a plate on the floor and soneone checks theres only one person on it before a button is pressed that solves that and theres no reason to display the number. Flash up an error to retry if its more than 3 sigma away from the expected mean.
This doesn’t sound like they’re charging extra if you’re over a certain weight, which is what a lot of people here seem to be assuming. Its data collection for future designs.
People are aware that you get charged for overweight baggage for health and safety reasons, right? Anything over about 20 kilos is too heavy for a single person to safely handle so they have to get two people to do it, which costs more time and money. I would be very genuinely surprised if a few dozen more kilos from overweight baggage and people would be enough to seriously impact a plane’s flight unless you’re on a small town hopper
I welcome it. I’m harassed for the 1kg excess in my bag. If you’re not charging others more, I’d like not to be treated like that. Give me a discount then for every kilogram I weigh less by.
…the overweight baggage charge is because of health and safety, not plane weight. Anything over 20 kilos is too heavy for a single person to safely handle so they have to get two people to deal with it, which takes more time
You on the other hand aren’t being handled by anyone. You’re not a health hazard.
Could you share the source to this please?
Do you seriously think it would work that way? They wouldn’t charge you a single cent less. Probably charge others more though.
I think what they mean is that if their neighbor is allowed to weight 120kg with 8kg of carry-on and they weight 85kg, they might as well be allowed heavier carry-on. Doesn’t have to be one on one, and of course the carry-on weight limit is also done for a few other reasons, but that seems to be the idea.
To be fair: Carry-on that is weighty is a safety risk. So is me in a window seat with a person that can barely fit into a single seat in the two seats aisle-side from me.
I’m comfortable in my weight. However, my girlfriend is not. We won’t be flying any airline that weighs us. That would be a small crisis for her.
That would be a small crisis for her.
Hah!
Shit - that wasn’t meant to be a pun
You have your whole luaggage scanned, body scans, fingerprints, passport and even custom officers asking you where you stay and god knows what background checks are going on, but weight is gonna be an issue ?
Where she is right now mentally, it’s best for her to not have a number put to what she weighs.
Fair, it doesnt change the reality tho, its just a number whatever that number may look like.
I dont agree with that proposed practice either, in fact i would be more happy if we wouldnt have to go through most of the “safety” procedures they put in place, but its not going to change my choice of airlines because i book whatever is convinient and affordable.
From an engineering point of view it makes really good sense because the better you can estimate a plane’s weight the better you can maximize efficiency blah blah blah. But these are humans not numbers, and it’s a bit rude…
Humans not able to battle climate change, because they can’t admit their weight.
Planes have a maximum weight, and it really matters where exactly in the plan that weight is. Even if it was rude, which it isn’t, it can be an important safety concern
It can’t be safety concern, comercial airplanes already fly with an lenormous margin of fuel, it is probably to allow the company to reduce this margin since they know the exact value and it is not an approximation that would always consider the worst case.
This will probably mean that airplanes would take off with less fuel average that can reduce the safety of the fly by almost nothing and reduce a little the cost for the company.
It should not increase the safety of the fly because it is already too high related to fuel.
If you don’t understand planes, the location of the weight matters at least as much, if not more, than the amount of weight. Having a bunch of really heavy people at the back of the plan can absolutely be a safety issue. It doesn’t matter if the plan isn’t anywhere near the max takeoff weight.
But this is an already fixed issues, no airplane crash happened recently because a chubby guy on the first seat, the average is already being used without any risk to passengers.
Again, commercial airplanes are already too safe to any of your suggestions make an actual difference, and if it could actually make a difference Europe agencies and FAA would have already emmited alerts related to this (not an imperialist issue but they are financially attached to boeing and airbus so they usually push the standards further), and a random ass company would not be the leader of this safety standard.
If it’s rude they can buy 2 tickets for their fat ass and skip the requirements to be weighed
Personally I think it’s a bit rude when someone is hanging over into my seat, pressed up against me and forcing me out into the aisle. I’d like to sit in 100% of my seat please.
I put some weight on over the pandemic and I do sympathise that losing weight is quite hard. But fuck if it got to the point I needed 1.5 seats, I’d either do something drastic about it (like the time I had 500 calories a day for a few months and dropped from 15 to 12.5 stone, sorry for the caveman units), or book two seats.
Dude that’s a pretty insane diet. Seems pretty dangerous or you were way underestimating your calorie intake.
I will readily acknowledge that it was unsafe (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that’s when my heriditary hair loss kicked in). I was taking a vitamin supplement and using myFitnessPal to track calories, some days I only had 300 calories but most days I had 500-600.
For me, gradual weight loss seemed unattainable. I kept trying and failing. So I just said fuck it I’m going to do something drastic to lose the weight. Of course, having willpower and losing the weight gradually is the best way to do it.
Nothing more to add. They can buy two seats.
I had a woman the other day doing this. She was determined to type on her laptop despite not just her body but her elbows / arms breaching my side. After about an hour of this I got fed up, seized the moment as she got something from her bag to actually sit back in my seat for the first time. She did not like this and proceeded to stubbornly type like a t-rex with her elbow either in my guts or smashed into the crook of my arm.
Not sure what’s difficult to understand for someone like that; if what they want to do involves spreading out into someone elses seat, then they have to pause the task.
