An American airline wins the right to weigh passengers on its Samoan route | Hacker News Reader

An American airline wins the right to weigh passengers on its Samoan route

economist.com

164 pointsnether218 comments

Pilot here.

Every airplane has a maximum weight it can fly. Different than cars, every airplanes also have an envelope where the center of gravity has to fall enter. If the center of gravity is behind the design envelope, airplane has a tendency to flip backward, stall on take off then crash, it has happened before. It could also means if the airplane enters a spin, the recover may not be possible. If the center of gravity is too forward, it will slow the cruising speed due to increased drag, much easier to stall during cruise and burning more fuel.

So for every single flight, pilot or dispatch has to calculate those 2 numbers, for every passenger and baggage, and decide how many fuel to take on each flight.

Of course, asking each passengers weight would be awkward at best, so airlines and FAA used an average body weight number to avoid this, it worked until 2003. An accident happened which killed 21 people on board a small transportation aircraft. It is found that the average body weight number FAA and airline used were outdated http://www.ntsb.gov/Investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/AAR... FAA has since advised airlines that what FAA presumed average weight of its population has increased, and advised airlines to do the same.

Of course, this will only work on average cases, and will fail if the sample group is out of average. Resampling has to be done to remain operating in the envelope, and if standard deviation is still out of normal, each individual weight has to be taken.

In many half-empty flights, the crew allows passengers to freely change seats, after take off. Obviously only a few do, but wouldn't that be dangerous anyway, given your comment on balancing weigh?

TFA references "an American airline". Since we Americans are misanthropes, when we freely choose our seats we have a balancing tendency. Your concern would be more valid for populations who would naturally choose to sit together.

What kind of group would choose to sit as close as possible in a plane?

I've seen it happen on trains, in Asia. Different cultures have different attitudes about this sort of thing.

It would seem that you would only have problems when the weight is unevenly distributed. I've only ever seen people spread out when allowed to take any seat, which would tend to make things more even if anything.

Notice, after takeoff. Takeoff and landing are when centre of gravity is critical. You're supposed to return to your originally assigned seats for landing too.

Why not add a weight sensor to every seat?

It would be more economical to have scales in the floor at the check-in counter, no?

Weight sensors cost next to nothing. Plus it being hidden in the seat gets rid of the taboo of people getting weighted.

Certification of weight sensors for general aviation OTOH ...

I haven't stood at a check-in counter in years...

That just shifts the cost to software, which is really complicated and expensive when you're talking about avionics software and airline ticketing systems.

If you do that, you need to synchronize the check-in scale with the aircraft, and the ticket-assigned seat with the weight. You also need to hope they're not gate checking much luggage (which could shift the CG resulting from their weight a lot) or crowding too much and putting two people on the scale.

But yes, the idea to minimize the number of sensors is a good one. I think the ideal place for this would be a pressure sensor within the oleo struts of the landing gear. High-resolution hydraulic pressure sensors are readily available. There would be some static friction errors (I've tried this with hydraulic cylinders, but it's reasonably close. And inducing a little dither in the hydraulics takes out most of the error.) Then you would know while waiting for take-off exactly where the CG was! And all that could be directly wired to and managed by the hard real-time avionics and electronics on the plane, and displayed to the instrument panels where it's actually needed.

...and running a Google search for 'oleo strut pressure sensor center of gravity', it appears there are already multiple patents for similar systems from 30 years ago and older.

> But yes, the idea to minimize the number of sensors is a good one. I think the ideal place for this would be a pressure sensor within the oleo struts of the landing gear.

Yup, this exists.

> In its final report on the Fine Airlines accident, the Safety Board discussed the Sum Total Aft and Nose (STAN) system, which is an electronic system installed on some cargo airplanes that allows flight crews to verify an airplane's weight and balance before departure. According to the report, the STAN system uses pressure transducers to convert main gear and nose gear shock strut air pressure to an electronic signal. The system then provides flight crews with a digital readout in the cockpit (on the flight engineer's instrument panel) of the airplane's gross weight and CG values.

http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/A...

Easier - add weight sensors to the landing gears. A set of piezo sensors between the mounts and the frames should suffice. Only three sensors to calibrate and maintain, they can give a real-time indication of the actual balance of the aircraft (including fuel), and don't impose on the airline's customers (or staff, other than to move a few people around to correct for a bad CG, something they do today).

I remember thinking this as the obvious answer as well, but then reading a few forum threads discussing that these already exist but were not reliable enough to rely on.

That was some time ago, I wonder if the situation has changed any.

Why is this a manual process? Is our technology not sufficient to build a plane that can detect when it has too much weight on board for a safe flight?

No, its just too expensive, and probably too heavy.

If OP is right (pretty sure he is), he said that by using something completely free (average weight), we were able to achieve like 50+ years of safe operation of largish commercial airliners. That's amazing.

Also, the problem isn't too much weight per se, it's weight distribution.

Wasn't this the reason behind Aaliyah's plan crash?

Thanks for this context... I'm assuming based on the framing of the article that this particular case was based more on a concern for fuel cost than for safety. (Surely a commercial airliner can't be dangerously upset by shifting a few thousand pounds...)

Since the airlines and FAA have to operate averages most of the time and update them as the demographic of their flights changes, would it not be a simpler, more socially opaque solution to just charge slightly more for the flights that tend to carry heavier passengers? More fuel, yes, but now paid for. No one has to endure the indignity of weigh-ins, and the airline is made whole. Why is this not the solution that was presented?

It's a big problem with smaller aircraft. A crash in 2003 [1] of an overloaded 19-passenger commuter aircraft out of Charlotte, NC led the FAA to require airlines to increase their assumed average passenger weight by 20-30 pounds.

[1] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/A...

Will look at the report, but the last I heard it was the luggage shifting during initial lift-off that caused the control loss.

I was pretty happy my brother drove to pick me up in Charlotte that morning. The other option was to take the Greenville leg, which is 30 miles closer to them.

I struggle to see the problem other than human vanity as to why passengers aren't weighed with their luggage.

If you can accept that your bag costs the airline more in fuel why not accept that your weight contributes also?

The airline discussed in the article are not weighing passengers in other to charge them a different amount, though

Fuel is weak argument. Vendover Productions recently did a video on youtube around costs around flying. IIRC the cost was less than 10%.

That said I do not mind to be weighted as long as airline guarantees something in return for my height. I would be in favour for some government regulation that seats should be progressively sized from small to large.

Some airlines from taller nations like Lufthansa and SAS have extra row of more legroom, but back support is still a problem and its not easy to get them.

It's not only about cost of the fuel, it's about putting the appropriate amount of fuel on the plane for the weight the plane needs to carry.

Right now airlines have to overcompensate for potentially fat passengers and fly with extra fuel that costs efficiency and what could have been more cargo room.

>Fuel is weak argument. Vendover Productions recently did a video on youtube around costs around flying. IIRC the cost was less than 10%.

I found that hard to believe so I Google'd it. I came up with 35%

You have fixed costs and variable costs. I would guess that is the reason for the discrepancy.

According to that guy its even less than that: https://www.google.co.nz/amp/bgr.com/2016/05/16/why-is-flyin...

2.5$ for 70$ flight

According to the Boston Globe it's 34% [1]

According to that link its claim that a fully loaded A320 uses $2.50 worth of fuel from DC to NYC @ 105MPG.

Solving for $, they're claiming jet fuel $ = 1.33/g

That puts jet fuel at half the price of unleaded in many states, including California.

I didn't believe that until I checked the price online and found it's currently @ $1.50. Didn't know jet fuel is cheaper than gas.

One additional note - DC to NYC is a very short flight. Ratio of fuel cost to ticket price likely increases with flight distance.

1 - https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/17/fuel-prices-...

>That said I do not mind to be weighted as long as airline guarantees something in return for my height

Negotiating are we?

A big point people in the thread below this comment seem to be missing is that airlines aren't aiming to break even. A tall person on a flight isn't going to make that flight unprofitable. Prices are set based on what people are willing to pay, not the cost of flying them. It makes much more sense to raise prices across the board by a couple $ than waste time and money weighing every passenger you fly, dealing with people who lie about their weight when booking and trying to charge them extra at the airport.

Not to mention there is probably a large section of the populace with an illness that effects their weight that would have to be ruled out of this anyway due to discrimination legislation.

Someone I know whom I had talked to before about this issue put it quite succinctly: "the laws of physics don't care about equality or rights or discrimination or whatever else. If they say the plane isn't going to fly, it won't; and if you try to challenge them, you are going to lose."

It costs more to lend money to black people even if FICO is held equal [1]. The lender doesn't care about your race, they care about your probability of repayment. Is it legitimate to charge people higher interest rates solely because they are black?

It costs more to employ a woman, since she'll get sick more and poses a higher risk of vanishing into babyland. Is it legitimate to lower her wage commensurately?

I don't know the answer to these questions. But unless you are willing to bite the bullet and endorse the racial/sexual discrimination I propose above, you don't have a clear answer either.

[1] See this comment for calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13156153#13167650

I think you are confusing two different issues. It is more expensive to lend money to black people because race is a predictor of poverty. Wealth can be measured directly, so discriminating based on race isn't really an effective strategy (ethics not withstanding). In the cost of fuel argument the root cause of the increase in cost is the weight of the passenger (it isn't just a predictor). The gender discrimination case is more complicated, but if companies want to modify wages based on expected medical leave required, I don't really see a problem with that.

No, that's simply not true. See the comment I linked to. A black person with a 600 FICO has a 40% chance of default, compared to an Asian person with a 600 FICO who has only a 20% chance of default. With identical financial indicators the black person is less likely to repay. Race discrimination is directly profitable, given the available data [1].

Now it's true that in this example it's just a predictor. The very nature of lending is stochastic. Then again, airplane crashes as a function of weight distribution are also stochastic.

[1] It's theoretically possible - likely even - that some hidden data may reduce the influence of race. For example, lenders are required (more or less) to ignore location data since that could be "redlining".

Simplified comment:

Is weight the cause of increased costs and decreased safety? Yes.

Is blackness the cause of non-payment? No.

Original comment:

I think there's an important difference between directly consuming a resource, and being broadly lumped into a group that has an elevated chance of increased consumption as a proxy for other underlying factors: primarily socio economics. Why stop at that level of granularity when you can easily keep slicing. What's the comparison between college educated members of each group? What about children of professionals? I think the brutish imprecision of stopping at race, especially that it's almost certainly not the cause, makes it a very different argument.

As an aside, wtf is the point of FICO if not to be a measure of precisely these outcomes?

Suppose the airline had a scale which worked in the following way. It will measure their weight, but add randomly generated noise of a few pounds either way. Suppose this scale is perfectly adequate for the airline's purpose - i.e. it provides a sufficiently accurate measurement to provide safety - but it no longer provides a "true" measurement.

Based on your reasoning, since this scale is no longer a perfect measurement of the true causal factor, it shouldn't be used.

In reality, passenger weight can vary between weigh-in and getting on the plane. The passenger might eat food or use the bathroom before boarding. Weight on-plane, rather than at boarding time, is the true cause of decreased safety. Weight at boarding is merely a statistical approximation to this (and admittedly a very good one).

Reality is uncertain, so it seems we are back to the same place.

Tangentially: Why stop at that level of granularity when you can easily keep slicing...As an aside, wtf is the point of FICO if not to be a measure of precisely these outcomes?

The reason for this is that using more factors is often legally problematic. Such factors are often correlated with race and regulators therefore treat using them as "redlining." For example, (income = low) AND (location == oakland) might also be predictive, but that's strongly correlated with race, and regulators will rape you if you try and use it for predictive purposes.

Also, from what I've seen, your suggesting that slicing further will eliminate the predictiveness of race doesn't seem to be true. At the very least, we often need to slice much further than our available data sets allow. For example, FICO includes a lot of data but still doesn't make race non-predictive. Similarly, in education, race is still predictive after accounting for parental income - rich blacks do worse than poor Asians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_...

The idea that we can avoid these ethical questions by slicing data in the exact right way is probably not true. We should instead figure out our ethics so that we can do things right even if the data doesn't turn out the way we imagine.

> From what I've seen, your suggesting that slicing further will eliminate the predictiveness of race doesn't seem to be true... The idea that we can avoid these ethical questions by slicing data in the exact right way is probably not true

Are you taking the position that some races are genetically pre-disposed to these behaviors - that their race is the root cause of them?

I personally don't think so, not because it would be an unpopular position (popularity has little place in a discussion of truth), but because I have seen little compelling evidence of it.

If you agree, then you must also agree that slicing data around causes would necessarily provide better predictive metrics. In this day and age of intense data collection, I find it hard to believe that we can't do better than "Oakland" or "Asians" or "Blacks". You'd probably go bankrupt pretty soon while your competition does real data analysis.

Still, it is undeniable that race - the way society is currently structured - can provide easy and useful proxy to a whole host of predictable behaviors. If we were econobots, concerned only with maximizing immediate economic gains, we'd maybe use it.

But this is an old idea. We know we are paying slightly in short term economic benefits, for human social benefits, as well as long term economic benefits.

That's why we have affirmative action, and mix low income housing with rich housing, and similar programs: because we discovered that ghettos are self perpetuating, and make it more difficult to change one's standing. So we pay a little now in economic effeciency for a better aggregate economic future.

It is a very interesting question what is the true underlying cause here other than FICO not being able to find a non-racial factor. I would imagine finding such a factor (or factors) would be incredibly valuable.

If I were given the job the first place I would look is to see if the effect holds with immigrant black people verses those born in the USA.

The only evidence I see here is that FICO is apparently a poor/insufficient predictor of default rate, which causes additional information (race => socioeconomic background => default rate) to increase accuracy of the prediction.

Again, I'll point out that you've cherry picked an idiosyncratic point on the FICO scale (600, vs. the 620 cutoff used by industry for subprime loans), and cherry picked the cohorts you're comparing (Asians being least likely in general to default), both of which has the effect of maximizing the delta you're citing as evidence for your argument.

It would be a nit, except we had a long thread about this previously wherein I perceived you to have conceded these points, so I'm surprised to see you repeating them here.

Would you mind pointing me to that thread? Would love to read it.

He has helpfully linked to it.

I'm confused what you are arguing. What specific claim did you dispute (as I recall none), and what do you believe I conceded?

In that thread I concluded you had no substantive disagreement and were merely looking for excuses to call me racist. (Why you enjoy that so much I don't know, but I don't mind so enjoy.)

As far as the argument I make here, what do you believe this refutes?

> In that thread I concluded you had no substantive disagreement and were merely looking for excuses to call me racist. (Why you enjoy that so much I don't know, but I don't mind so enjoy.)

I haven't read all of your and tptacek's recent exchanges, but in the ones I have, he has been meticulously respectful to a fault, so this seems like an unfortunate lapse. Since I know you care about the principle of charity, I'm sure you won't mind my asking you not to do this again.

I would agree with Dang here.

I am a big fan of you and Thomas. And I love reading your discussions on a topic and have read most of them. I tend to agree with your arguments more but I must say that Thomas is very respectful while disagreeing and I haven't seen him call you a racist. Feel free to link to his comment where he does and I will stand corrected.

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13184555

Context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13173952

The remainder of the thread had no substantive disagreement, just questioning my motives for discussing a factual claim.

For the argument you're trying to make, this is such a weird cite. The thing I was "wrong" about was that you weren't a white supremacist, and my wrongness was due to the immediately preceding comment in which you stated directly that white supremacists were "mostly factually correct".

I still don't believe you. You're right: the comment you cited was a moment of incivility (specifically: I was sarcastically dismissing you). I don't believe that you think white supremacists are mostly factually correct. I think you get a rise out of zapping this particular raw nerve, and feel like you're so gifted at rationalizing message board comments that nobody will pin you down on that.

The parent asked whether you really did call me a racist, I provided a case where you did (and you just agreed that you called me a white supremacist). That's all.

I don't mind the attack, I just wish it were easier to tell when you were interested in intellectual discussion. Intellectual disagreement is fun, but threads like the one I linked to feel like getting rickrolled. Less fun.

But all of those are statistical discriminations, which are largely blind to sex and race, it is the application which wanders into that dreaded racial/sexual discrimination zone, but those are social constructs anyway.

How can this possibly be discriminatory against Samoans when the airline explicitly stated that seating arrangements were to properly distribute weight on the aircrafts?

1. The airline's motives have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with race

2. The airline clearly explained its motives

It's almost as if people actually don't understand what discrimination means.

I know a lot of people who would probably be too embarrassed to be weighed and wouldn't fly.

Perhaps they should work on their weight then? If this new practice affects the airline's profits, it'll solve the problem or take the losses.

You don't need to be overweight to be embarrassed to be weighed.

If only my anorexic friend had known sooner that she just needed to work on her weight, she could have avoided things like nickel-and-diming airlines. (not only so I think the distribution claim is bogus, but it's a precursor to billing by passenger weight)

It's not the duty of airlines to cater to every mental illness. Are you suggesting that they stop the whole show because one person with a relatively rare disease might be too embarrassed to use their service?

Elsewhere in this thread it was mentioned a Samoan airline actually already does charge by passenger weight.

Yes: because Samoa Air's fleet aircraft are all Cessna 172s. You are essentially paying for a personal charter flight in a small aircraft, so there are no "averages" there. A single obese passenger can directly increase a flight's payload weight by +100% or more. Not the case with an airliner, where you are averaging across 75-600 people.

In general aviation just because the seat is there doesn't mean you can take off with someone in it. As a rule of thumb, "one seat" is a 150 pound person, no luggage, and sometimes that's counting some of your fuel there too. A 2-seat aircraft like the Cessna 152 doesn't take off with full tanks with 2 average adult males onboard even without luggage (360 pounds full-fuel payload), and it's a struggle to get off the ground with 2 heavier adults even with reduced fuel.

The C172 is a four-seater aircraft, 577 pounds full-fuel payload (note: less than 150 lbs per seat!). So with full fuel tanks you will get one pilot, one passenger, and either some luggage/cargo or a child passenger. Maybe a second adult passenger and no luggage if nobody is too heavy (above 175 lbs average). And an over-water flight in the Pacific is not the trip to take with a reduced fuel load. So you can see how the numbers work out here: the pilot plus one obese adult might literally be the entire payload for the flight.

(Note: a 2003 study from the New Zealand Ministry of Health set their "average" male passenger weight at 187 lbs without carryon, or 207 lbs with carryon, and the average female passenger weight at 159 lbs without carryon or 169 pounds with. Further, they noted that average passenger weight was increasing at about 2 kg/6.6 lbs per decade.)

source: https://www.caa.govt.nz/pubdocs/2003_pax_weight_survey.pdf

Very informative. I just took the liberty of converting your post to units I can read (sorry for the pathological imperialphobia :) )

> Yes: because Samoa Air's fleet aircraft are all Cessna 172s. You are essentially paying for a personal charter flight in a small aircraft, so there are no "averages" there. A single obese passenger can directly increase a flight's payload weight by +100% or more. Not the case with an airliner, where you are averaging across 75-600 people.

> In general aviation just because the seat is there doesn't mean you can take off with someone in it. As a rule of thumb, "one seat" is a 68.03 kg person, no luggage, and sometimes that's counting some of your fuel there too. A 2-seat aircraft like the Cessna 152 doesn't take off with full tanks with 2 average adult males onboard even without luggage (163.29 kg full-fuel payload), and it's a struggle to get off the ground with 2 heavier adults even with reduced fuel.

> The C172 is a four-seater aircraft, 261.7 kg full-fuel payload (note: less than 68.03 kg per seat!). So with full fuel tanks you will get one pilot, one passenger, and either some luggage/cargo or a child passenger. Maybe a second adult passenger and no luggage if nobody is too heavy (above 79.37 kg average). And an over-water flight in the Pacific is not the trip to take with a reduced fuel load. So you can see how the numbers work out here: the pilot plus one obese adult might literally be the entire payload for the flight.

> (Note: a 2003 study from the New Zealand Ministry of Health set their "average" male passenger weight at 84.82 kg without carryon, or 93.89 kg with carryon, and the average female passenger weight at 72.12 kg without carryon or 76.65 kg with. Further, they noted that average passenger weight was increasing at about 2 kg/6.6 lbs per decade.)

> source: https://www.caa.govt.nz/pubdocs/2003_pax_weight_survey.pdf

Just weigh them together with their luggage, so that no one knows how much does the person without the luggage weighs?

That doesn't necessarily solve the weight distribution problem if the luggage and the passenger are not positioned together on the airplane.

Still not a problem: weigh the person together with her carry-on luggage.

Not a great solution. People that board later tend to place their carry ones farther from their seats because that's what's left.

It could be done automatically/anonymously, or people could even be weighed in pairs.

But for a small flight with 6 passengers (which is the case most important to get right) it's probably going to be a manual affair.

That said - people might have all kinds of things they feel are embarrassing, such as removing their shoes which might be required in security. While I don't agree with TSA routines much - I still don't think we should care what people feel is embarrassing. Get over the embarrassment, fix your weight or avoid flying are 3 very real options.

Man, for 6 people, you could just look at them and seat them evenly in about two seconds flat.

Yes. I know from experience that's actually how it usually works.

Anecdote: I flew a Cessna 6 seater in Venezuela and couldn't sit next to my wife, instead had to sit next to a 50kg sack of frozen chicken (the implication being that me and the chicken were the lightest, and my wife was heavier than the chicken sack by enough). I laughed and laughed. Pro tip: don't laugh.

We already have somebody looking at our naked body as we walk through mm-wave scanners, and that hasn't deterred anybody. I don't think a discreet scale would be that big a deal. It's not like their weight needs to be displayed to everyone around them.

If you wanted to be discreet/efficient about it, putting scales in the body scanners would be a great place to do it since you're already dealing with people one-by-one anyway.

They could scan your ticket into the body scanner to identify/validate your ticket, and then it spits the weight back into the airline's computers for balance calculation.

I mean, at that point it's really their choice, right? It's not like the airline will broadcast their weight to other passengers. If you choose not to fly instead of letting the airline weigh you (like everyone else) for your safety, that's fine too.

I don't really get the airliner's reasoning. They say they're redistributing the weight, but if on this flight, most people are Samoan anyways, shouldn't the weight distribution be the same as other flights (since it's the same population)? It's a bit confusing....

You cannot talk about discrimination without also talking about disparate impact[0]: Policies which, while not being of discriminatory origins, end up disproportionately hitting a certain class of people.

This happened a lot in housing policy. decades of racist housing and bank policymeans that blacks end up being "stuck" in low-income housing, even when black families in fact make a lot of money[1].

So now if you make any policy based around the land value of housing in many urban areas, this policy ends up disproportionately affecting blacks. Similarly, because of this, ghettos are formed, so any policy based on geography (school funding is a big one) also ends up disproportionately affecting blacks.

You might think it's unfair to claim an action is discriminatory when the motives are not so. But the alternative is to not acknowledge who these policies actually affect. If the effects of an action are discriminatory, does it matter whether the motives were such? At least in the context of removing discrimination?

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

[1]: "on average, whites earning only $30,000 live in better neighborhoods than blacks earning $100,000" https://jdodgeblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/on-coates-and-ne...

It is not and should not be the duty of anyone to mitigate disparate impact. It is, by definition, not the fault of the "accidentally discriminatory party".

The Civil Rights Act outlines protected classes from discrimination. I don't really see the argument against the government taking action against disparate impact in such situations.

After all, the point of the CRA is to remove discriminatory situations. Much like a firefighter trying to stop a fire, whether intent is there is beside the point. The objective is to fix the problem.

Though I don't really know whether what's mentioned in the article is really a case warranting action. The harm applied here seems pretty minor (no assigned seating).

By your argument, no analysis should ever be applied to any decision involving humans because that has disparate impact.

Car insurance companies should only charge one rate, because otherwise they're discriminating against teenagers and men. Health insurance companies should only charge one rate, otherwise they are discriminating against smokers. Life insurance companies should charge one rate, otherwise they discriminate against men. Annuities should all have the same payouts, otherwise they discriminate against women for the mere fact that they live longer on average.

Really, I understand your sentiment, but government mandate is not the solution.

Have you thought that maybe this is an argument against private insurance? Why should life insurance be necessary, instead of proper safety nets provided to all by he government. Why shouldn't car insurance be somehow "built in" to the cost of the car? Considering everyone needs it and everyone needs cars in America. Annuities are also just generally bad in practice for the consumer.

Also, health insurance companies can discriminate against smokers, they're not a protected class for a reason.

I think insurance is a bit tricky because it's a mess of adverse selection and other effects that make it very different from "classic" free-market stuff.

I don't get your reasoning. On this flight, most people may be Samoan, but all Samoans are not overweight in the same way, and the variance of passenger weight is larger than with other flight routes. For this reason, finding out how much weight you put on each seat is actually very relevant for flight safety.

My reasoning was that, if you took a random sample from a population and seated them in the plan, then you'd be extremely likely to end up with a left-right weight imbalance of (for example) 50% of the average weight of a person from the population.

I would have guessed the probable imbalance in any case would be very low compared to the total weight of the passengers + cargo, so not a big deal. But I suppose the airline tested whether their solution worked?

People don't sit on a plane randomly. Fat families sit together. And randomness is not an equal distribution.

Also, cargo is lighter than the human payload. Most people aren't lugging around their body weight in luggage.

And, people do not object to weighing their luggage - and cannot prevent it or raise a noise if someone weighs it - so luggage can be loaded in a balanced way.

Discrimination is differentiation. When you differentiate fruits in a market, you are a discriminating customer. Illegal employment discrimination is differentiation of employees on a protected category.

Weight <can> have something to do with race, just like IQ tests can have something to do with race, in the lens that they are more likely to affect one racial population than another, and the hiring outcomes they produce may sustain or encourage a disproportionate racial distribution.

So police stations have engaged in an affirmative argument that the use of IQ tests in employment candidacy is a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ).

> Hawaiian Airlines...discovered it was burning through more fuel than anticipated on its route between Honolulu and...American Samoa

Why not just increase the ticket price?

Presumably they did that if the cost were an issue, the primary problem discussed in the article though is keeping weight balanced on the airplane so it doesn’t crash, not the cost of fuel.

I recently flew a regional airline that had strict policies about bag weight (20 pounds or something). They had scales for luggage right there. Then I thought to myself: the difference between my weight and anyone a few inches taller — regardless of fat — could be way more than 20 pounds, especially given some muscle. It makes little sense to inconvenience people by checking bags that are slightly over-weight, while standing next to someone that is probably twice the difference.

Maybe, then, a rule for bags is also based on the distribution of weight in the overhead bins, as well as the difficulty of knowing exactly where the heavy bags would be. People are easy to identify and move, bags probably need to be more uniform. Plus, it would encourage relatively small bags (to help with the space issue).

Informative video about giving a breakdown for the cost of flying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Oe8T3AvydU

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13268990 and marked it off-topic.

In what way is it off topic? It directly addresses the point raised in the comment it is replying to.

When discussing controversial topics on Hacker News, we need to cleave to the topic at hand (weighing passengers for air travel, in this case) to avoid the threads degrading because of the already-heightened sensitivity. You can sometimes tell if you haven't succeeded by whether the ensuing subthread becomes about something else. It has here, predictably.

Additionally, you've brought up specific topics of controversy which you've addressed several times before on this site without anything new to say about them. This is not in keeping with the guideline that asks us not to introduce classic flamewar topics.

You could have just said "hecklers veto" rather than "off topic". Would have been less confusing.

I was confused because comment is pretty specifically on topic - it's directly illustrating why the ethics of height discrimination are not simple.

Scott's traveling, but asked me to reply with "on reflection, that seems fair" and to take off the offtopic penalty. So I've done that.

We put it back. See below.

If the issue is crash safety and weight distribution, wouldn't very lightweight people pose as much of a problem?

It is a concern and they do adjust for this.

For example, undersold flights or flights with many absent passengers will temporarily redistribute passengers during take off to ensure "balance". On a recent flight from Minneapolis to Helsinki, we were extremely underbooked but the distribution of passengers was fairly even - the announcement from the flight crew was that we could move seats but only once we were at the cruisin altitude.

I assume that there is some balance struck with averages on children, and it would explain random seat reassignments at the gate.

Weight distribution has cutoff at the lower end that is much closer to the normal weight than the cutoff at the upper end. Very petite people weigh maybe half as much as a normal person, whereas obese people can weigh four times as much as a normal person and still remain mobile.

Well, for that to be a problem, you’d need to have flights where you’re flying around a large number of lightweight people, which may not be a situation that’s presented itself. And even then, it’s probably a lot easier to unbalance the airplane by putting a bunch of very heavy people all on one side than by putting a bunch of lightweight people on one side and normal weight people on the other side (the weight differential between "overweight" and "normal weight" can be much larger than the differential between "underweight" and "normal weight").

Large numbers of lightweight people = a class of children, or a couple of large families.

The only time I've ever been upgraded was when 80% of economy class was children on various school trips, and I was put in premium economy when I checked in.

There seems to be 2 distinct justifications for this.

1. The plane has to be at a safe weight to fly. I'm ok with this.

2. The airline wants to charge more money for heavier passengers. This is getting into discrimination territory.

It might have been more positive to redefine standard human weight as being heavier, and give discounts to smaller people.

"Tall people earn substantially more money on average, and so it seems only fair (from this short writer’s perspective) that they experience a bit of added discomfort or have to shell out extra for a roomier seat. But the overweight and obese? They receive no such life benefits, and it feels rather cruel, if not illegal, to ask them to pay extra for the same service."

Jesus...

I was just about to comment on that. Quite bizarre commentary for a Economist article.

Please expand on what you find disagreeable here, else the post is just white noise and not really appropriate for HN.

I do think the author's reasoning in that part is flawed and a bit vengeful simply because it seems to me like a misguided sense of justice and right/wrong, and that they want what they perceive as justice simply because of the circumstances of one's birth sometimes being a boon, sometimes being a burden.

But this is also a post from a blog, not an article from The Economist - I think the opinion is shallow and poorly thought out, but it's just an opinion.

It's a completely ridiculous comment. This policy isn't about "fairness" but rather weight distribution and cost of fuel. Punishing tall people for being born tall and making more "on average" is absurd.

"Please expand on what you find disagreeable here, else the post is just white noise and not really appropriate for HN."

That comment piqued my curiosity enough for me to read the article, something which probably isn't true for over 99% of the comments I read on HN. So I strongly disagree with you that it isn't appropriate for HN. There is nothing defamatory in what he says, and whether or not it is substantive can be decided with votes like all other comments.

Actually I skipped the last few paras after getting the initial tone of the article and this comment made me go back.

Its disagreeable because "on average, <type> people earn more than <!type> people, therefore all <type> people should pay more for the same service" is not an obvious conclusion to make. In fact, it is tainting some folk with the faults that others with a similar attribute have and is in the end discriminatory and unfair because their height was not a choice they made.

If the author had written that tall people should pay more because they are bigger and need a bigger space then that might have been more palatable, but in the end I'm not sure that the extra space is the significant factor, since I can sit upright easily in the vertical space allocated for everybody to walk through the plane. Do we also need to charge more for people with big hairstyles, or those who choose to wear high heels? Also, why is there a minimum cost for the average space needed, my partner (155cm) takes up less space than average!

I like your <type> statement because it draws to the bigger problems with generalizations. It's also the weird logic flow I see more and more in western culture.

"Privilege" is a word I hear thrown around a lot today. Often times when people use that word, they do not realize they are making broad assumptions about other peoples' circumstances (typically) based on an ascribed attribute.

To go even further in relation to this and air travel, is obesity ascribed or achieved? If you get charged extra for being tall, that's not something really in your control. Discriminating against an ascribed trait isn't really fair and is the reason for civil rights legislation.

There are cases where it's difficult to determine if something is ascribed vs achieved. This is why laws for marriage equality have taken as long as they have in much of the world.

In terms of obesity, we see the trends and we see it's increasing. This is something we can measure. Homosexuality was something that could be hidden, and therefore the measurements could easily be off as people may have lied in previous decades to fit in with social norms.

Ultimately, fighting obesity has a lot to do with education, and changing some of the very wrong ideas we have about what is and isn't healthy food. But that's another matter.

In the article, they're mostly describing airlines that weigh people to distribute loads on planes. That seems logical. Now in regards to airlines charging them a different price due to weight and fuel consumption, that gets into a very grey area of how we deal with the reasoning behind obesity, choice, human rights and market costs.

It's not a grey area at all. Airlines should have the right to charge customers per pound of items they take with them --- be it flesh or carry-on.

As should Uber et al.! Cars, like airplanes, use more gas if they have to transport more weight.

Marginally though. About 0.5l/100km more for every 100kg of weight.

That's more than 10% increase on most new cars.

...or cane, or wheelchair, or guide dog. Glad you have this all figured out in your libertarian utopia; in the real world there is still a debate.

This is what happens when you take "everyone is equal" to a delusional extent. Everyone should have the same rights, but not everyone is born the same. It is sad, but true.

I think the only reason one could come to your conclusion is that one does not understand the difference between being a lesser human being and simply being very misfortunate. Many are misfortunate; no one is lesser. I had cancer when I was little. Should everything in the world be modified to accommodate my specific needs? Should everything in the world be modified to accommodate the "average" person's needs? Perhaps that is how things should be in government, where the sole purpose of the entity is to serve its people. But it should not be the duty of any private entity to do such a thing.

> This is what happens when you take "everyone is equal" to a delusional extent.

I'm not really arguing one way or the other, just pointing out a number of cases that would likely lead to public outcry and therefore attention from regulators who do have the authority to impose their will on the airlines.

> I think the only reason one could come to your conclusion is that one does not understand the difference between being a lesser human being and simply being very misfortunate.

Or one could recognize that airlines are chartered as common carriers, and are therefore subject to regulatory oversight.

> But it should not be the duty of any private entity to do such a thing.

The private entity in question necessarily consumes public resources as part of its business model (ATC, takeoff/landing slots, ...). Hence the corresponding regulatory authority.

> Now in regards to airlines charging them a different price due to weight and fuel consumption, that gets into a very grey area of how we deal with the reasoning behind obesity, choice, human rights and market costs.

Right, and it's also a problem when you consider height and weight to be intertwined. Even among people of a healthy weight, a 5' tall person is going to weigh less than a 6' tall person, on average. If you really wanted to allow for pricing based on the idea that extra weight requires extra fuel consumption, but not for ascribed traits, one would have to normalize weight based on height, or instead by BMI or something that really defines the weight as "extra" and not normal for a person of a particular stature. (Unless you really do want to charge based on ascribed traits.)

Also, thank you for the "ascribed vs. achieved" nomenclature. I'd never heard that before, and I like how it avoids sounding negative and boils down the distinction very clearly.

This has nothing to do with BMI. The problem is exactly the same regardless of the BMI of any of the passengers.

It ONLY is about properly distributing weight. It's not a fat tax. It's not "oh, this person is heavy compared to their height, let's charge them more because they're inferior!".

It's only "we need more weight in the front".

I'm talking about a hypothetical where an airline might weigh people so they can charge differently based on passenger weight (to account for differences in fuel consumption), not just in order to reassign seats to balance weight distribution. Which is what this particular subthread happens to be talking about.

Not a hypothetical at all; the article mentions Samoa Air does charge based on weight.

> It ONLY is about properly distributing weight. It's not a fat tax.

Bogus. At best, "... yet."

Entire sports teams of children board planes filled with adults, without redistribution. They need to weigh every passenger now, just in case they might need to move that 1 larger person? If you buy that then I've got some oil you'd be interested in.

As far as I can tell, 1 commercial plane in history has had an accident due to balance and only because of tragically bad maintenance at the same time.

This looks like one of the more obvious cases of groundwork being laid for future fees veiled in safety concerns.

The bottom line for me personally is that it's just one more bullshit thing to endure when traveling via plane, and I'm biased against them at this point. Airlines are the skeeziest companies in their attempts to capture market surplus.

If you live in a smaller city, you'd know that this happens all the time. Nearly half the time when I fly on a tiny CRJ to and from my local airport, after everyone boards, the pilot will ask if three or four people could shift around (for weight reasons) before takeoff.

On smaller aircraft, this is standard operating procedure.

The Norwegian regional carrier Widerøe (Whose slogan might well have been "We proudly fly where everyone else is scared s--tless to!", operating a fleet of small to mid-size aircraft always play a game of musical chairs in their smaller (<40pax or so) planes prior to takeoff.

Edit: Ninja'd by gragas.

> fighting obesity has a lot to do with education

Based on the documentaries I have seen about US obesity, it also depends on your income. Its cheaper to buy junk food so lower income people prefer junk food to healthy food.

You could argue that a tall person should not be charged more than a short person for the same service, even if it costs more to provide it to them, on the basis that their height is a circumstance of their birth. You cannot make the same argument for someone who is obese, since their obesity is almost certainly a choice (or a result of lifestyle choices, depending how you look at it).

>since their obesity is almost certainly a choice

Citation needed.

In fact there's a HUGE industry of obese people making the choice to lose weight (diet, gyms, etc) and failing.

I think being obese is as much a choice as being poor is a choice: you're born into it and have obese friends who feedback into an inactive lifestyle. Escaping obesity is possible with hard work, as is escaping poverty, but its also not easy. That said, counting calories isn't that hard, but it does take discipline, and that's not easy.

>That said, counting calories isn't that hard, but it does take discipline, and that's not easy.

Several studies have shown that we're not good in discipline at all, unless for people that it's innate. So discipline might be a factor out of our control too (genetic), and it's just the presence of people with more innate discipline (against genetic) that makes it achievable.

Yea that doesn't surprise me, though studies also say that we're strongly influenced by our peers and are largely creatures of habit, so there are definitely tricks around this like hanging out with others into fitness or even lurking on a fitness subreddit.

There's a huge industry designed to sell the idea that losing weight is quick and easy if you just spend money. That's not the same thing.

There are effective weight loss coaches but since you already know their advice (which is that you need to permanently commit to regular exercise and you need to take permanent control your energy balance in order to sustain a target weight), and since their advice requires discipline to follow, they're somehow not as popular.

...their obesity is almost certainly a choice...

How do you know this? Have you done things like looked at research indicating the causal links between gut bacteria and obesity? There has been a surprising amount of it, for a random example https://www.sciencenews.org/article/obesity%E2%80%99s-weight....

I see no reason to believe that having a struggle to control weight is any more under our control than a desire to have sex with members of our own gender. Our conscious has influence on whether we actually do so. But some people have no problem, some people can struggle and avoid a problem, and some are pretty much doomed.

If we're going to grant that humans have free will at all (which is debatable, but still, everything works better if we do choose - heh - to make this assumption), then we have to grant that humans are able to choose whether or not to put any given item of food into their mouths and swallow it.

Note that I'm not arguing about whether we "struggle with" weight control or not. Some people absolutely do feel hungrier than others while maintaining the same daily energy balance. But the choice of how to handle that hunger, to keep overeating when you know you are already overweight, or to stop eating even though you still feel hungry, absolutely is something that an individual can control.

   indicating the causal links between

From the article you cite: "If the results hold up in humans ..."

What reason do we have to believe that questions of free will are transferable from the mouse model to humans?

First, I agree with you. But to answer:

One chooses to be obese more than one chooses to be tall, so arguing that tall people should have to pay more for their size while the obese shouldn't seems illogical.

> One chooses to be obese more than one chooses to be tall

I wonder - have you ever tried weed? With a few foreign molecules in your system you can go from barely liking cookies to consuming 5 boxes without being able to stop. The satiation part of the brain is very sensitive. Imagine having to constantly fight similar urges because of slight mutations in that zone. I think physical make up could be indirectly the most important factor in determining weight, especially when it comes to extremes like obesity.

edit: reworked phrasing

> Imagine what it would be like fighting similar feelings every second of every day because your satiation part of the brain is a bit off.

Yeah, that's how I stay not-obese.

Yes, they choose because of poor diet choices, nobody is hooking up a tube of big macs to their faces. A quarter of the entire US population didn't suddenly catch a disease and become obese.

Being sedentary and taking in 2500 calories a day is definitely a choice. A very small percentage of obese people have hunger as extreme as your 5 cookie box example. All it takes is not paying attention to caloric intake over a long period like 5 years.

I'm not expressing an opinion about the causes of the current obesity problem, but your comment had the opposite effect on me than the effect you wanted.

"A quarter of the entire US population didn't suddenly catch a disease and become obese."

Why not? When you put it that way, it strikes me as pretty implausible that 'a quarter of the entire US population suddenly became lazy and started stuffing their faces for no good reason'. Epidemics have happened frequently before; bouts of mass overeating are historically rare.

It happens a fraction of a percent at a time. Let a population increase their caloric intake by 0.2% a year, while their lives get more and more sedentary, and you will get an obesity epidemic in less than 30 years.

"Unrestricted junk food marketing + 100% sedentary lifestyle between sitting in the office, driving, and watching TV" explains mass obesity trends better than anything else, no pandemic needed.

>Why not?

Because it's obviously not contagious (diseases don't honor human defined borders). It's the culture of junk food and giant meals.

> A quarter of the entire US population didn't suddenly catch a disease and become obese.

Please explain how your statement of fact is true considering that this cited paper is stating that there is such a disease and possibly some portion of that population obesity is a product of this disease.

"Adv36 causes obesity in animals. In humans, Adv36 associates with obesity both in adults and children and the prevalence of Adv36 increases in relation to the body mass index."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4517116/

> possibly some portion of that population obesity is a product of this disease

Please state how "possibly some portion" is supposed to have any meaning whatsoever.

> Imagine having to constantly fight similar urges all the time

I don't have to imagine, I have a child who survived a TBI that included damage to the hypothalamus. He's never satiated, always wants food. Even with strict diet controls and a locked pantry and a refrigerator with a lock and chain around it... he still manages to get food.

It's a living nightmare.

The degree of difficulty in controlling obesity has little to do with whether it's more controllable than height. Height is basically fixed, and trying to control it would involve starving yourself even harder, for longer, and doing so while you're a child.

>Please expand on what you find disagreeable here, else the post is just white noise and not really appropriate for HN.

Maybe don't assume what's "appropriate for HN" (unless something is obviously offensive or spam, etc)? Far from white noise, the parent pointed a specifically interesting (and inane) excerpt from the post. Whether you agree or disagree, it doesn't take much imagination to see what one can find appalling in that part.

First, not sure if the author is half-joking, but the notion that tall people are fair game because they "earn substantially more money on average" is especially idiotic. Something true "on average" (and from statistics the poster read for specific cultures/countries) doesn't obviously apply to all members. Besides, rich people, whether short or tall, don't pay more for anything else they buy unless they they want too -- so again this would be just an arbitrary tax on tallness.

Second, the post goes on to say that "the overweight and obese? They receive no such life benefits, and it feels rather cruel, if not illegal, to ask them to pay extra for the same service".

Only it's obviously not about having benefits in other fields of life (!), it's about their weight's cost to the airline (more personal weight amounts to less cargo, more fuel etc).

>But this is also a post from a blog, not an article from The Economist - I think the opinion is shallow and poorly thought out, but it's just an opinion.

So?

> Maybe don't assume what's "appropriate for HN"

As members of the HN community, that is literally our job to do. Communities are maintained by agreeing on and enforcing norms. You may not agree with someone's assumptions about whether or not something is appropriate, but they are absolutely within their rights to make a value judgment based on that.

> Far from white noise, the parent pointed a specifically interesting (and inane) excerpt from the post.

Yes, but this is a discussion forum. Quoting a section of text and then "annotating" it with "Jesus..." is not discussion, and doesn't foster discussion, at least, no aside from the "yeah, no kidding" variety. Fortunately, in this case, someone has called the poster out on it, and has in the process started discussion about it, but that's in spite of the original, not because of it.

>You may not agree with someone's assumptions about whether or not something is appropriate, but they are absolutely within their rights to make a value judgment based on that.

As a member of the HN community, consider where this leads: endless flamewars and meta-discussions on comments, instead of TFA.

Note also that I'm not against people speaking on what's "appropriate for HN" in general, just against particular uncalled for instances. If a comment is defamatory or off-topic etc, it's a fair game.

>Quoting a section of text and then "annotating" it with "Jesus..." is not discussion, and doesn't foster discussion, at least, no aside from the "yeah, no kidding" variety.

Quoting and exclamations are very much part of discussion. In fact, for quoting this should go without saying. From books to scientific papers and on to legendary literary or scholarly exchanges, you'll find extended use of quotations. It is an act of curation and highlighting. Same for the annotation "Jesus", that serves to give us a clear indication of what the commenter thought of the quotation (he doesn't approve of it).

You claim that "it didn't foster discussion", but you are disproven in reality. Besides the distracting meta-discussion, the comment did foster discussion of that particular quote, which you can see in the thread below, with people arguing pro and against the very ideas expressed in the quote.

> As a member of the HN community, consider where this leads: endless flamewars and meta-discussions on comments, instead of TFA.

Which is why it's generally more appropriate to use the downvote & flag buttons rather than engaging in meta discussion. Which we're clearly not doing here ;)

> You claim that "it didn't foster discussion", but you are disproven in reality. Besides the distracting meta-discussion, the comment did foster discussion of that particular quote, which you can see in the thread below, with people arguing pro and against the very ideas expressed in the quote.

Hmm. Yes, that's true, but 1) we do have this distracting meta discussion here that wouldn't be here if the original post wasn't so content-free, and 2) I see something as a quote + simple explanation as the laziest, weakest way to attempt to foster discussion. Yes, that's just my opinion! And you're right in this case that some (good!) discussion did result from the original (IMO weak) post. But that doesn't mean that's anywhere near the best way to foster discussion, and I'd like to see the bar raised; this is a great community that I don't want to see degrade.

The tall hate is real. As a tall person myself (6'4''), I am open to paying a bit more for taller seats and a bit more leg space. Because of the absolute impossibility of the former, I have found myself avoiding less important trips altogether.

I'm 6'2" and broad-shouldered. First class seats, while not taller, give more leg room and more width and are hence much more comfortable for me. Have you ever flown business or first class?

That costs a lot more than ordinary tickets. Often 2x.

That is an understatement. If it was only 2X, I would fly business class more often when going between continents.

They definitely are far more expensive. This is why I maintain loyalty with a frequent flyer program with an airline that has a generally decent business / first class.

For shorter flights, I'll sit wherever and gain miles/points, but for anything 3+ hours, I'll use an upgrade (about 15k miles/points) for a better seat and service. This keeps the flights inexpensive, while opening up the option for more leg room when I really need it (I'm 6'6").

Seriously, dude. That is some privilege.

Sure, it' a privilege to fly business class. But dingo_bat explicitly said he would pay more. How would it not be relevant that paying more for better seats is actually an option.

I've flown business and the extra width helps a lot. But the height of the seat still prevents me from leaning my head and sleeping off. Also, business seats cost ~2x usually, which is more than I am ready to pay :)

> First class seats, while not taller, give more leg room

Also exit row and economy+ (for the airlines that offer it, e.g. Delta).

Unfortunately some airline companies (e.g., Dutch KLM) started charging extra for exit row seats because of the premium of extra legroom. So not only do you get the extra noise and cold draft that come with aeroplane exits, you also get to pay extra for the privilege of not ending up suffering from deep vein thrombosis after a twelve hour flight.

Ugh, I'm broad-shouldered as well, and I've had to give up picking aisle seats. You can only get run over so many times in a flight by the drink cart, and when your shoulders are wider than the seat is, you get trucked every single time.

At 6'8" I find all seats I've ever been on other than Spirit and Ryan Air work decently well unless I need to sleep. What issue are you facing?

Longer legs than you? I'm 6'1 and my knees already touch the back of the seat in front of me on regular airlines.

The biggest issue I have with most car and airline seats is the back curvature is completely wrong for my height. So even in a section or vehicle with ample leg room, there's a hump on the top of the seatback that does terrible things to my shoulders and neck.

Exactly my problem. I simply cannot use the seat back properly at all. My head cannot lean on the head rest, my back does not align with the seat. I just sit with all the grace of sitting on a stool.

I don't usually face a big problem with legroom. My legs are cramped but they fit. The bigger problem is relaxing and sleeping. I can't read on planes for longer than 10-15 minutes (I have to raise my kindle to my chest level in front of me, if I don't want to bend my neck), and the seat backs are just uncomfortable. I can't lean, can't sleep because my head rises above the headrest. Add the general lack of space in the standard economy seat and it's very uncomfortable for me.

It’s a joke. “(from this short writer’s perspective)” is the clue that the writer is joking about their small karmic victory over tall people.

I smiled as I read it and took it to be a joke, but it might do the writer some good to be a little less subtle here. Admittedly I'm not very tall myself.

Sounds like something George Constanza would say.

Hawaiian Airlines is not charging more for heavy passengers, they are delaying seat assignment and assigning seats based on weight (for better weight distribution):

So Hawaiian Airlines instituted a new policy. People flying between Honolulu and American Samoa would no longer be able to select their seats before arriving at the airport. Instead, they would be assigned seats when they checked in so that the carrier could distribute their weight evenly around the plane.

Ironically, Samoa Air (from their own country) does charge by weight:

...Samoa Air in 2013 became the first airline to charge passengers by weight.

I think the person's objection is that the logic presented in that paragraph is pretty terrible. (Otherwise, the paragraph reads like a bad joke, which should have no place in formal writing, especially not writing as reputable as the Economist.)

The Economist has always included the occasional joke and bad pun in its articles to lighten the mood. It's one of its charms.

I had to move my mom to another seat on a recent flight because the adjacent passenger spilled into three seats total. Everyone was uncomfortable until the large passenger (American college American football player) occupied two seats after my mom moved to a luckily open seat.

I'm on the side of horizontally/vertically large people need to pay for what they use, because forcing another passenger to stand for a 7 hour is ridiculously short-changing other paying customers. [0] Or throwing off the CG of a plane to where it may be uncontrollable and crash... yeah, I want that because people are too precious about their weighs.

PS: I happen to be so tall as to be at the 0.1% percentile range and barely fit into any coach seat without folding my ankles into my pockets. Sports cars, clothes and shoes all have an PITA tax for being vertically-challenged. And I couldn't fit it an F-16 if I wanted to, fuck my life. LOL.

0. http://abcnews.go.com/US/passenger-forced-stand-obese-flyer-...

I've always heard "vertically challenged" as a short-person euphemism, it's funny to hear it refer to tall people in this context

As a shorter person, that sounds like flamebait indeed.

Taller people have issues while flying that never really bother me, from having their knees bashed by seat reclines to having minimal elbow space.

i stopped reading at this point.

This is obviously a joke, in case "from this short writer's perspective" didn't give it away.

https://youtu.be/AvbuNj37Z8I

You as an individual should pay more because you're an idiot

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