Pay-as-You-weigh should take off

The move toward turning passengers into freight was taken by Samoa Air in 2013 when it began charging passengers according to weight: one Samoan tala per kilo, including their baggage. Considering the airline flew mostly domestic routes and the nation is thought to be largely obese, this pay-asyou-weigh made sense. Subsequently, only Uzbekistan Airlines was reported to have also weighed in with the same caveat.

However, there is no doubt that many other nations have overweight populations — especially among the segment that travels by air. Airlines are also looking for more ways to trim their flab and make bottomlines healthier, so looking at passengers as freight could be the next bright idea. In any case, passengers have become used to being likened to cattle, so the switch to cartons would not be a great comedown.

While a recent court case in the US is examining a legal challenge to this weight differential in pricing, there is a logic in the argument that since energy spent by an aircraft in flight is tied to the total weight it has to carry, it is unfair to make thin passengers subsidise the heavier ones as all tickets are priced the same. At a time when obesity is spiralling out of control in many countries, such a system could also prompt some people to finally shed adipose so that they can carry more by way of luggage on their future flights.