Cheap fares, including cheap airplane tickets, cheap vacation packages, and discount travel packages are why many would be travelers decide to fly. Debate is growing over whether excessively overweight fliers should be forced to purchase a second seat.
40 percent of Americans surveyed in April said that they would not mind being publicly weighed at the airport, according to YouGov, an Internet market research company.
Passengers and airlines have different reasons for wanting obese fliers to purchase multiple tickets. Neighboring seatmates would not be inconvenienced if seriously overweight passengers were assigned two seats. Airlines, on the other hand, are motivated to find ways to reduce weight or the cost to carry it.
One airline has already started charging airfares based on the combined weight of its passengers and their baggage. Samoa Air charges passengers between 93 cents to $1.06 per kilogram, depending on the flight.
If and when a major airline follows suit, it can expect to face claims of discrimination. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance says that if airlines want to start charging by weight that they need to reconfigure their planes so that small, medium, and large seats are offered to passengers of different weights.
Given that airlines operate hundreds of flights carrying thousands of passengers daily, implementation of pre-flight weigh-ins appears daunting, if not impossible. Travelers would have to arrive at airports two to three hours early, flights would invariably be delayed, and more staff would have to be hired to weigh passengers.
A preferable approach, at least according to some experts, would be for airlines to uniformly enforce second seat rules which specify passengers should be charged for a second seat if they are unable to fit in a single seat with a seatbelt on and armrests down.
Today such policies differ between airlines and are frequently inconsistently applied, which further aggravates the problem.
63 percent of the survey respondents said that passengers should be required to purchase a second seat if they could not fit in a single seat with the armrest down. The majority believe that fliers who pay for a seat should be able to use all of it.
While weighing passengers at the airport appears unrealistic for major airlines, the one positive result from such a policy would be that it would be a wake-up call for obese travelers and probably have a positive impact on the health of such passengers.
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