[MProgrammer]

I would rather they took the fuel based component out of the ticket price, then charged you an amount at the gate based on the total weight of everything you are bringing on the plane, including yourself. Then you can pay less by bringing less, or pay more to bring more. A gram's a gram.

[mjb]

Using the model from the article, about 33% of the ticket price is total fuel cost, and 16.5% ($1300 of $7900) is 'weight marginal' fuel cost. Combining these two gives us 5.4% of ticket cost on a full airliner is weight marginal fuel cost.

Extracting 5.4% of the ticket price and making it pay-by-weight (or, rather, by the proportion of the total margin weight you make up) seems fair. On the other hand, 5.4% is a pretty small number compared to the other costs associated with "pay by weight". Lots of people would be, justifiably or not, angry about paying more because they are fatter, taller, or not a child even if that is only a few dollars per hundred on the ticket price.

On the other hand, as a tall person I would strongly support being able to pay marginally more for more legroom. Many airlines do this with a tiered model ('premium economy', 'extra comfort', etc), and it works really well for me.

[omegant]

Then just taking in to account the overweight rates at the USA, you are insulting more than half your possible costumers that will happily throw their money at your competition. Ryanair has discovered this after years calling their own passsengers idiots that will take anything for flying for 20€. Lots of Ryanair passengers now fly with Easyjet , Vueling, etc... And Ryanair is changing the saving rules to avoid loosing more market.

[rett12]

That could be considered as discrimination against big tall men(not overweight). Another thing is luggage.

[DavidBradbury]

In order for it to be discrimination, it has to be 'unjust' - There is nothing unjust about having larger people pay more because it costs a business more to fly them. If anything, it is unjust that smaller people have to subsidize the cost of others.

[pkaye]

What about wheelchairs, service dogs and baby carriers brought on board?

[gaius]

And there's nothing unjust about paying women less because they'll just quit to have babies, right? Society has decided that that's not how it works.

[sp332]

You're allowed to discriminate against even "protected classes" of people if it actually materially affects their performance. If a woman is actually pregnant and can't lift heavy things, and that's part of the job requirement, then you're allowed to not hire her. If a heavy passenger is actually costing you more money for fuel, you'd be allowed to charge that person more for fuel. This is moot though, since height and weight are not protected categories and you can already discriminate against them all you want!

[Dylan16807]

You could make a fair argument along that line if you measured the cost. Just having the baby means a few weeks off at most since there's nothing gender-specific about childcare, average person has about two babies, a couple months out of decades of work, you could reasonably argue that women should make about a quarter of a percent less than men.

My point is, don't bring up a flawed argument that's used to support unfair discrimination to attack another argument. That's nothing more than a strawman.

[dahart]

I don't see how this analogy fits, or what you mean about society, but there's a slight bit of difference between charging someone for direct costs, and jumping to conclusions based on fear, stereotypes, or gender.

There's also a difference between charging someone for actual expenses, and charging someone for presumed future expenses. And there's a difference between someone being charged for what they use, and someone being paid, or not, for purely indirect costs not related to their performance while on the job.

Now, if a 120 lb woman was charged twice as much as a 120 lb man to fly, your analogy might be more applicable.

[gaius]

Is paid maternity leave not actual expenses then?

[dahart]

Paid maternity leave is an actual expense, if it happens. But you were talking about salary. And it is unfair and discriminatory when equally capable women are paid less than men, regardless of the reason it happens, and there are many other reasons than the probability of a woman having a child.

While those facts are true, they don't improve the quality of your analogy, the situation you're bringing up does not stack up the same way as (theoretically) charging someone per pound to fly on a plane. There might be reasons that charging by weight is discriminatory, but you're not convincing me.

[bluthru]

That's like saying it's discrimination that a tall person has to buy more food to survive.

[waps]

That's the whole point of discrimination laws. I don't know if you ever checked but people aren't kidding when they say non-christians, non-whites, ... are more criminal and less smart and ... with the exception of one or two asian ethnicities. In theory saying this by itself is not discriminatory, only acting upon it is, but I doubt most people will agree. But you're going to find actual statistics supporting that. Yet any conclusions obviously are discriminatory.

What's worse is this. Suppose you have 2 groups with each a normal distributed variable (like weight, height, money, likelihood of criminal intent, ...) and let's say a 1% difference in the peak (which is what everyone will always report, standard deviations are also always different, but nobody ever reports them, but when people say Asians are less tall than Caucasians in 1% of cases (real figure is about 6%), this is what they mean). To make things simple, lets say

group A ~ N(100, 10)

group B ~ N(101, 10)

(N(100, 10) is like the "standard" normal distribution for things without reasonable units)

What do you see in practice ? Suppose you meet someone (randomly) from group A and someone (again, uniform random) from group B. What are the chances the member from group A is heavier/taller/richer/more criminal/... than the member of group B ?

E(X > Y, X ~= N(101, 10), Y ~= N(100, 10)) ~ 59%

So in our example, if you meet an Caucasian and an Asian, and there's 1% height difference between the groups, the chance is about 60% that the Caucasian is taller than the Asian. If taken the real figure, 6% difference, then the chance becomes 91%.

This is the problem that causes racism. Tiny differences in a normally distributed variable make a large difference in actual encounters.

[chrisBob]

Is there anything wrong with discrimination against tall people? It has nothing to do with their age, race, gender or sexual preference, so I think height and weight may actually be fair game.

[theg2]

I hate to be that guy but should we be charging people more (effectively punishing them) for something outside of their control? Sure it may be "fair" in terms of economics, but it's a slippery ethical and moral slope if I've ever seen one.

[willis77]

> should we be charging people more (effectively punishing them) for something outside of their control?

Car insurers charge young people more money, despite their youth being outside of their control.

[iLoch]

Are they actually charging young people more, or are they charging inexperienced drivers more?

[vonmoltke]

Yes, they are. I got my drivers license and first car when I was 22. Length of driving history was not a question when I got insurance, and I got charged the same as 22-year-old males who had been driving since they were 16.

[Dylan16807]

Young people.

[theg2]

True, but I do think experience has a lot to do with the equation there. Pretty much all insurances are based on the chance of payout but I don't know if that should apply to the prices of things like physical goods or in this case air travel.

It's dangerously close to an argument such as "People of color have to pay more or can't use this service at all" or "Blonde hair blue eyes" you know?

[zacinbusiness]

Wow you're stupid.

[chrisBob]

A good analogy might be with the clothing industry where larger sizes are more expensive.

[zacinbusiness]

What's wrong with with discrimination based on eye color? Shouldn't anyone with blue eyes be killed at birth? That's not on the list you mentioned, so it's fair game, right?

[Dylan16807]

Discrimination based on eye color is completely fair! Blue eyed people have more trouble in bright sunlight, so you can use that as a tiny mark against them in relevant jobs.

I don't know how you confused discrimination with murder, but you should probably double check a dictionary.

[sp332]

chrisBob should have added "legally speaking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

[chrisBob]

I think killing babies is a big jump from making heavier passengers pay more. The airlines already consider weight in their cost when you pay for baggage.

[chrisBob]

I am all for charging more to heavier passengers. I appreciate that the first class cabin subsidizes my flight, and I hate the fact that my ticket is more expensive so that the big guy who is invading my personal space doesn't have to pay extra because I am paying an equal share.

People would plan and pack differently if they weren't shielded from the economics of flight this way.

I have been on a few non-commercial flights, and they always make me step on a scale before I get on the plane.

[WalterBright]

> I have been on a few non-commercial flights, and they always make me step on a scale before I get on the plane.

The weight variation makes a big difference for smaller airplanes. Big airplanes can use a statistical average for weight calculations, but small ones cannot.

The weight calculation is necessary to compute fuel load and takeoff distance, for example.

As I recall, there was a major airline crash once because the airplane was overweight compared to its calculated weight. Since then the airlines revised the average passenger weight upwards.

[jevinskie]

And the smallest planes have to worry about distribution of passenger weight to maintain proper balance.

[seanmcdirmid]

This much more than what parent stated.

[zacinbusiness]

Invade your personal space? Really? Your personal space? You entitled piece of shit.

[chrisBob]

I am sorry if I have hurt anyone's feelings. Having someone lean on you for 5 hours because they don't fit in their seat is extremely unpleasant. I thought "invading personal space" would be the polite way to put this.

[pkaye]

Make sure to subtract the extra labor cost of doing all these measurements and the loss of customers in implementing this policy.