I think you missed what I meant. I was saying that 'big boned' people are generally not going to be affected by this. A hormonal imbalance alone will not push you over the limit. Laziness will. Yes, they can't help the imbalance. No, this does not excuse them for not even trying to fight it. Some people can't use their legs, so they go around in wheelchairs. They don't lie in bed and say "It's okay if I don't go outside, my legs don't work." I'm one of the lucky ones - I will probably cut off a block of cheese to eat and it's 4:19am as I write this, and I weigh around 150lbs. I'm genetically disposed to not gain weight no matter how hard I try. But, if you're not like me and you WILL gain weight - don't be eating cheese in the early hours of the morning. Have a healthy lifestyle. Fight it. Go for walks, even if it means taking a break halfway through. It's better than crying into your takeaway and blaming your genes.Vrach said:Actually there are. I'm not talking "genetics" as in "big boned", I'm talking genetics and diseases as in "hormone imbalance leading to weight gain" and such. As I've said above, those people are few and far in between considering the number of fat people, especially in some countries...Thyunda said:
...but they are there. I'd classify those as genuine disability however, as it really is a medical condition and not just a "ribs dipped in marmalade taste way too good at 3AM".
Should the overweight pay more for airfare?
- Thread starter VivaciousDeimos
- Start date
Um... unless youre so fat you cant fit in one seat (in which case buy the seat beside you or go for the cheaper and healthier option of losing the weight) I dont think they should unless there's a clear study and statistic showing that you being above a certain weight causes the plane to be slower/costs the airline more.
If they need to take up two seats, then yes, they should pay for two seats. If they NEED two seats, but try to squeeze into one seat and have half of their body in another seat, they should be forced to buy 2 seats. That's fair.
Lionsfan said:
Well done, well done. That was a masterful piece of work. And I have to say, the pink was a nice touch.
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While I do think it wouldn't be terrible if overweight people had to pay more for a flight, the reasons I would accept it are essentially [user]Ed130[/user]'s thoughts on the subject.
I don't see how this is related to the topicprojectpinkx said:
The metaphor would make more sense if the bigger customers also demanded bigger burgers, more chips and bigger drinks from their meal in which case it would be fair for them to be charged more yes? after all most of us are just saying if they take up more room on a flight, they should be charged more since they payed for 1 allocated seat, no more.
OT:I just agree with the whole make em pay if they can't fit in a seat comfortably, give em 2 seats and charge them either a tad more
Look, The problem is.. this is the view of Peter Singer(Edit: I am assuming its Singer, but the notion is sphinctery enough to be his). A guy who has expressed the notions that Animals should be treated with greater respect than that of a debilitated infant or infirm senior. He asserts that we should not feel qualms with performing euthanasia on infants with crippling birth defects. Has asserted that we should not feel bad by providing sexual gratification toward animals as long as it is in such a means that does not harm the animal and has even somehow managed to piss off a group of people absolutely terrified of ever getting angry again in the Germans and sending them into a state of riot over the prospect of his presence at a speaking engagement that had to be cancelled because of him.
So you simply cannot put any sort of stock into Peter Singers ideology because it is almost as if his role as a sociologist is to try to see just how he can piss people off before he gets himself lynched.
Hes kinda like a modern day Freud, yanno, without the class, wisdom or insight.
As for the assertion? In a way it makes a degree of sense, except the price of pissing people off is not justification to offset the minor disparity. The concept is that discounts should be given to those who cause less fuel expense and penalties for greater expense but when it is all said and done that disparity ends up coming out in the wash due to law of averages. I halfway suspect that Singer posited this after being on a flight where he was situated between a couple of fat guys.
Besides all that... Is there not enough drama at the airport without having to corral people like cattle in order to be weighed? Sounds a little inhumane dontcha think?
Its a bogus principle that falls apart under scrutiny, pretty much like damn near every idea Singer has ever put forward.
So you simply cannot put any sort of stock into Peter Singers ideology because it is almost as if his role as a sociologist is to try to see just how he can piss people off before he gets himself lynched.
Hes kinda like a modern day Freud, yanno, without the class, wisdom or insight.
As for the assertion? In a way it makes a degree of sense, except the price of pissing people off is not justification to offset the minor disparity. The concept is that discounts should be given to those who cause less fuel expense and penalties for greater expense but when it is all said and done that disparity ends up coming out in the wash due to law of averages. I halfway suspect that Singer posited this after being on a flight where he was situated between a couple of fat guys.
Besides all that... Is there not enough drama at the airport without having to corral people like cattle in order to be weighed? Sounds a little inhumane dontcha think?
Its a bogus principle that falls apart under scrutiny, pretty much like damn near every idea Singer has ever put forward.
Funny. I was weighed when I got on a small plane... (capacity of 15 passengers). Aviation safety authorities also tend to state that the smaller the plane, the heavier you have to assume each passenger is.Thyunda said:
(The figures I saw suggested a large commercial jet goes with an average of 78 kg, while smaller ones use 82.)
Running a flight sim I also noticed that a small plane designed for 7 passengers, cannot actually fly with even 7 passengers of average weight without reducing the fuel load (and thus the range) to about 40% of maximum.
In any event, this is all kind of arbitrary. If a large aircraft is 90% empty. (Something I've experienced surprisingly often - in fact on one of these flights they let me on with about about 50% more than the luggage allowance without charging me), then the weight of the plane itself is going to mean a lot more than the weight of the passengers.
Take for instance the A380 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380
It's seating capacity is about 644 passengers for a typical configuration.
Typical Operating empty weight is listed as 276,800 kg (That's the plane + crew & everything needed to operate it except fuel)
Using typical figures for a plane that size (78 kg/ passenger + 20 kg luggage), 644 passengers weigh (50232 + 12880 kg) = 63112
The plane also has to shift the weight of it's fuel, so actual costs are surprisingly complex.
But it should be clear that the payload of a fully loaded A380 is just 22% of the overall weight of the aircraft.
That means, that (very) roughly speaking (remember, the way fuel is loaded and burnt makes the calculation non-linear), the cost of flying the aircraft from point A to point B when empty is around 80% of the cost of when it is full.
Therefore, so long as you don't actually overload the plane entirely, doubling or even tripling the weight of an individual passenger would not triple the operating cost, but increase it by a factor of (0.2*3)+0.8 = 1.4
Given that 80% of the cost is moving the aircraft itself around, the cost per passenger as defined by weight has to vary A LOT for it to mean anything.
if you increase a passenger's weight to 10 times normal, (Remember, that's 780 kg. Even people considered morbidly obese are rarely that much over 200. 780 would be world record candidate material), the increase in cost to move this passenger is still only:
0.8 + 2 = 2.8 times that of a more typical passenger.
And that assumes the plane is full.
If it is only 10% loaded, the passengers only represent 2% of the weight. Now this means the cost for one ordinary passenger is 1, the cost for our record-holding obese person is 0.97 + (10 * 0.03) = 1.27
For someone who is perhaps obese rather than a freak of nature, they'd be maybe 0.97 + (1.5 * 0.03) = 1.015
Can you honestly say that these figures are significant enough to bother with the kind of measures that would be required to figure out who is heavy enough to pay extra?
At least someone occupying more than one seat actually does legitimately cost twice as much to move around. (although this too is meaningless unless the plane is heavily loaded.)
The idea isn't worth the hassle really.
I can see the potentially extremely harmful implications that some people can see with this idea. Those who are genetically large, be it from hormones or metabolism or something, will feel insulted because they can't help it, and those who CAN help it will feel insulted because someone's calling them fat.
As for my stance on the subject, heavier loads require more fuel. Flights aren't a right; they're a privilege, and someone has to pay for the extra fuel used. It only seems fair that the person who needs more fuel to carry needs to pay for more of it, right? However, I'm a scrawny guy, so perhaps I don't fully recognize what impact this may have on people who would be forced to pay more, nor am I an air plane engineer, so I don't really know how much the extra fuel would cost. In order for this idea to work at all, the price deviation shouldn't be a substantial amount. If it's too much people would start complaining and trying to cheat the system. If it's too little, though, it would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole idea.
This is one of those ideas that seems like it would work at first, but once you think about it, it doesn't seem good any more. I do like the idea of people who take up more than one seat having to pay for a second one, though. Having the person next to you spill over into your personal space is really uncomfortable, especially for a person like me who gets anxious when he's touching someone.
As for my stance on the subject, heavier loads require more fuel. Flights aren't a right; they're a privilege, and someone has to pay for the extra fuel used. It only seems fair that the person who needs more fuel to carry needs to pay for more of it, right? However, I'm a scrawny guy, so perhaps I don't fully recognize what impact this may have on people who would be forced to pay more, nor am I an air plane engineer, so I don't really know how much the extra fuel would cost. In order for this idea to work at all, the price deviation shouldn't be a substantial amount. If it's too much people would start complaining and trying to cheat the system. If it's too little, though, it would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole idea.
This is one of those ideas that seems like it would work at first, but once you think about it, it doesn't seem good any more. I do like the idea of people who take up more than one seat having to pay for a second one, though. Having the person next to you spill over into your personal space is really uncomfortable, especially for a person like me who gets anxious when he's touching someone.
No thanks. I exceed that limit by a lot, but it's not from being obese.
I support charging extra to people who require multiple seats, but that should be the extent of it.
I support charging extra to people who require multiple seats, but that should be the extent of it.
A lot of people seem to have missed the fact that this has nothing to do with health and everything to do with physics: it takes more fuel to fly a heavy object than a light one.
What the object is makes no difference. A 300lb morbidly obese dude, 300lb athlete, or a 300lb box of lead are all the same to the engines.
Charging a flat fee (to cover administrative costs) plus a per-pound weight rate (for fuel) makes sense from a physics standpoint.
What the object is makes no difference. A 300lb morbidly obese dude, 300lb athlete, or a 300lb box of lead are all the same to the engines.
Charging a flat fee (to cover administrative costs) plus a per-pound weight rate (for fuel) makes sense from a physics standpoint.
Short answer no
Longer answer, no but if they physically take up more than one seat then charge them for that. One of my co workers was in the marines for several years and when he got out, he was 6'6" and weighed 230lbs but was muscle and not fat and should not be charged extra for a plane ticket. However, a few years ago on a particularly horrendous flight, two very large Albanian women sat on either side of me. And the little kid in back of me kept throwin' up the whole time. The flight attendants ran out of Dr. Pepper and salted peanuts. And the in-flight movie was Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore. And, oh yeah, three of the airplane engines burned out
and we went into a tailspin and crashed into a hillside and the plane exploded in a giant fireball and everybody died.
Except for me
Longer answer, no but if they physically take up more than one seat then charge them for that. One of my co workers was in the marines for several years and when he got out, he was 6'6" and weighed 230lbs but was muscle and not fat and should not be charged extra for a plane ticket. However, a few years ago on a particularly horrendous flight, two very large Albanian women sat on either side of me. And the little kid in back of me kept throwin' up the whole time. The flight attendants ran out of Dr. Pepper and salted peanuts. And the in-flight movie was Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore. And, oh yeah, three of the airplane engines burned out
and we went into a tailspin and crashed into a hillside and the plane exploded in a giant fireball and everybody died.
Except for me
In america they have a man wearing a glove gripping your junk.Tubez said:
As for me, I already don't fly because of security, I take a train or drive. In the case of international travel I would have to take one though.
As for this purposal it doesn't actually take everything into account, what about people that come on the plain with kids, those kids will be way under the weight limit.
Also I'm 20 lbs over the weight limit, I'm 240 lbs so...fuck these guys. XD
Basically this. If you can't comfortably fit in a single seat, one should be required to buy a second.Tubez said:
Not really sure how I'd fit on that, as I can barely fit into a single seat as is, but that's more because I'm freakishly tall than from being fat (though I am overweight, so it may well be a combination).
I think they should have a test seat that they make you sit in. If you take up two seats you pay for two tickets and get two reserved seats.
Hahahaha, truly funny.McMouse said:
*ehem*
OP:
Yes, heavier passengers should pay more. More weight = more thrust needed to take off, more fuel spent. It's all been worked out in teh maths.
I found this handy link about weight and airplanes, load and fuel: [link]http://www.pilotfriend.com/training/flight_training/wt_bal.htm[/link]
OT:
I can't count the number of times I've specifically asked to have Lactose Intolerant as my food option, and then on the plane discovering that they didn't get me the meal I fracking paid for. (Only happened on United, [that other American airline], and Air Canada)
I think that is extremely stupid. Why should some who is quite possibly born that way pay extra? Its pretty well established that you shouldn't be unfair to those born with black skin, why should we be unfair to someone who was born with a slow metabolism?