A story on Yahoo news mentions that the Philadelphia newspapers are running advertisements for a fake airline, Derrie-Air (get it?). The airline advertises that it is carbon-neutral, and that it charges per passenger pound — $1.40 from Philadelphia to Chicago, $2.25 from Philadelphia to Los Angeles.
Screen shot from flyderrie-air.com.While quite mythical, this pricing structure is not unreasonable: the heavier people cost more to ship; and at a time when fuel prices are so high, this seems especially important and a good way of letting price reflect marginal cost.
Also, heavier people spill over onto their neighbors’ seats, generating negative externalities for the other passengers. So I hope a few real-world airlines take notes and think about charging heavier passengers extra.
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AaronS’s ideas are not bad.
But there are also monitoring costs. Weight should be relatively easy to check — flatulence, bad breath, or snoring might not. (Drunkenness is: even today, the flight crew can prevent drunk people from boarding the plane. And if they do not comply with the crew’s instructions on the plane, they can go to jail.)
Charging for pound is a good idea. But the setup of the seats has to change: it must be long rows along the length of the planes (people would face each other, Military c-130s are configured in this way). This would solve most of the “my seat is not big enough” issues.
Looks like anorexia will be back in style among frequent flyers.
This also hurts tall people, also. Tall, skinny people can weigh as much or more than short, overweight people.
So will us mesomorphs get to pick on the ectomorphs on these flights? I mean, we’ll be paying more – not because we’re fat, but because we’re fit. We should at least get to bully the nerds
To the list of travelers who should be be subjected to new fees or charges, I’d like to add clumsy people who can’t manage their luggage without assistance, stupid people who don’t understand even the simplest instructions from security or airline personnel and rude people who disrupt the otherwise joyous flying experience to which the airlines treat us today.
My suggestions are a joke of course, but the proposal made in this post is at least semi-serious, which is what makes it so dangerous.
As long as we continue to blame passengers for the failure of legacy airlines to devise sustainable business models, we might as well pick on everybody.
The formula really shouldn’t be:
Ticket price = multiplier x passenger weight
A better formula would be
Ticket price = base price + (multipler x passenger weight)
For a given plane flight there are fixed and variable costs. The fixed costs would include the pilots and crew (they are getting paid the same ), the payments for the aircraft and airport, and other overhead. This would all factor into the base price.
The variable costs would mostly have to do with fuel (for weight). This would factor into the multiplier.
It is also important to keep in mind that there is a “fixed” component to fuel. An empty 737-800 weights about 90,000 lbs. When you add in crew, supplies and the fuel required to carry an empty plane the total would be up around roughly 125,000 lbs. With 180 paying passengers, there really should be a weight allocation of almost 700 lbs per person.
This means that a 100 lb person should be given a total weight assessment of 800 lbs, and a 300 lb person with 2 50 lb bages would be given a weight assessment of 1100 lbs.
or:
Ticket price = base price + multiplier x (700 + passenger weight + baggage weight)
This shows that a ticket price based strictly on a multiplier x weight (as is the case in the ficticious derrie-air example) is quite unfair for heavier folks and a significant bargain for lighter folks in terms of capturing the airline’s total cost of providing the transportation service.
Nice in theory, but as people above have said, who wants to be weighed at the airport?
Perhaps, if seats could be made so they are size flexible, people would be required to:
a) pay a fee per square inch/feet(/desired increment of size) of seat space
b)pay for a seat in which they fit comfortably (to avoid forcing oneself into a smaller seat, and suffering ‘seat creep’)
This way people could also pay for extra space, should they so desire.
Makes complete sense: shipping-wise. I can’t send all of my packages through USPS, UPS, etc, for the same price. It costs more to transport a bulkier, heavier package.
As @Ubu says, though, how does it work out logistically?
“Also, heavier people spill over onto their neighbors’ seats, generating negative externalities for the other passengers.”
The day airlines provide seats that even AVERAGE can fit into will be the day I’ll begin to consider this. I’m a fairly average male with slightly broad shoulders. I still wear a size Large t-shirt and find myself having to squeeze my arms in on every airline so that I’m allowing my neighbors to have some sort of armrest to use.
“If one wants to be overweight in one’s own home, so be it, but regular people should not have to be exposed to it.”
And the list goes on and on…
- If one wants to not shower in one’s own home, so be it, but regular people should not have to be exposed to it.
- If one wants to eat garlic and onions in one’s own home, so be it, but regular people should not have to be exposed to it.
- If one wants to snore loudly in one’s own home, so be it, but regular people should not have to be exposed to it.
- If one wants to read Freakonomics in one’s own home, so be it, but regular people should not have to be exposed to it.
When traveling by air, you’re going to face every walk of life. It’s part of traveling. Plus, while banning smoking makes sense because of the dangers of second-hand smoke, I’ve never heard of someone becoming fat by sitting next to an overweight person. Inconvenienced? Sure. But who isn’t, in some sort of fashion, including those listed above, when they ride these cracker tins with wings they call airplanes?