After the paying luggage compartments and the “standing” seats, here is another idea of the airlines that the passengers will love to hate.
Weight is the enemy of air transport. More weight means more fuel and therefore higher costs, especially at a time when rising fuel prices are weighing significantly on airline results.
Everything is weighed except passengers
Everything is good to reduce the weight of an aircraft. Elimination of the paper press offer in favor of a digital offer, thickness of plastic glasses and weight of cutlery, there is no small gain. A few grams here or there multiplied by the number of passengers and kilometers can add up to millions of euros.
This is also the reason for the existence of baggage policies. Depending on the price of the ticket and the class of reservation, you may or may not be entitled to one or more hold baggage items, one or more cabin baggage items, and if you want more, you will have to pay an often substantial supplement.
Remains the “passenger” variable. Since it is not possible to weigh the passengers one by one, it is considered that they all have a given average weight. Of course in very marginal cases (centering of a very small aircraft) it happens that the passengers are weighed but it is very rare. While searching I found that they use an average weight of 93kg for a man and 75 for a woman…which leaves me a little doubtful even if in terms of fuel it is better to err on the side of caution.
A British company called Fuel Matrix has developed a system that allows passengers to be easily weighed without them even realizing it. When dropping off the luggage, the area on which the passenger is standing can be equipped with a mat that reacts to the pressure he exerts and thus determines his weight.
Weighing passengers? For what purpose?
So this does not concern passengers who have only one hand luggage, so the effect is limited on short/medium haul flights, but on long haul flights it would allow the airlines to determine the ideal weight of fuel to take on board.
A system that is not without questions. First, in terms of data privacy. It seems that the weight would be communicated to the airline but without the check-in agent seeing it. What’s next? What will be done with it? How long will the data be kept? We may quickly talk about GDPR.
And then there is the risk of deviant use. Weigh a passenger to improve the centering of the aircraft, why not. But between people traveling together, seats already assigned to others at the time of weigh-in, constraints related to cabin plans and travel classes, the usefulness will be marginal except for some specific cases. But from there to imagine that some use it to charge extra to passengers who are a little too big, there is a step that we can well imagine some airlines making cheerfully.
However, airlines spend $200 billion on fuel each year and this device promises to save them $1 billion in total. There are no small savings.
Photo : weighing of luggages by Africa Studio via Shutterstock
