Airline to charge by the pound

An article on Gadling caught my eye this morning. It gives the saying “pack light” a whole new meaning.

It’s arrived. New airline to charge by pound

I have had this same idea for a while and think it makes sense.  We pay by weight to ship packages.   Airlines weigh bags when they are checked to calculate the amount of fuel needed.  But they don’t weigh the passengers.  That doesn’t make sense.  They must use an average weight of a person in order to calculate fuel properly.  The built-in cost of transporting an average weight person is spread across all passengers whether they are heavy or light.  It’s not very fair to lightweights who subsidize the cost of flying a heavy person.

There will be some big challenges with this type of system.  Consumers want to know the price of a ticket before they buy.  The airline will need to estimate weight of passenger and baggage when when quoting a price.  This is an easy problem to solve if tickets are purchased on the airline web site.  Just enter your weight and verify at the airport.  They could estimate baggage weight by allowing the consumer to click on icons of bags like theirs and using some averages.  The airline would be shut out of big online travel systems such as Orbitz and Expedia until those systems make changes to accommodate weight based pricing.

A second problem is verifying the weight of the passenger and baggage at the airport and either charge or credit a passenger for an overage or underage.  They are able to do this now with baggage.  If a bag weighs more then 45 lbs., many airlines will add an extra charge.  I don’t see why the bags and people couldn’t use the same process.

Update:  Steve’s comment made me double check.  I looks like this is a bogus airline and must be a publicity stunt.  For what purpose, I can’t tell.  I still like the idea