Normal people should not be forced to subsidise the overweight on scheduled flights

Consider if you will the following festive hypothesis: A Floridian gentleman called Hank has two friends in London, England, and he decides to airfreight them each a Christmas present. The first friend is a keen collector of antiques and Hank plans send him a delicate porcelain figurine, which he packs in a shoebox filled with polystyrene balls in order to protect it. He takes it to his nearest UPS location, it weighs in at 1ilb and they quote him $161.46 to deliver it. Hank's second friend is an amateur nuclear physicist and he plans to send him a shoebox full of enriched uranium, which he wraps in lead in order to prevent any leak of radiation. However, this item weighs in at 50lb and the UPS clerk quotes him $482.60 to deliver it. https://wwwapps.ups.com... (Test my figures by requesting a quotes for both a 1lb and a 50lb pacakge to be delivered from St Petersburg Beach, FL 33716 to London, SE16 7SZ) Now Hank is extremely vexed about this and turns to the clerk and says: "Gee-whizz, buddy! Y'all want to charge me three times as much to send the same sized package to the same goddam city? Why, you dirty shysters! I am, like, so outta here. Yee-ha!" (Yes, that's the best American accent I can do. Sorry.) So Hank takes the gifts back home and explains what happened to his wife, Krissy-Sue. She suggests that, in view of the high cost of sending them by airfreight, they may as well buy a couple of cheap airline tickets to London and deliver the packages in person. Hank agrees and, the next day, he and Krissy-Sue are at the airline check-in desk with their bags. In hers is the antique figurine while his contains the uranium encased in lead. Krissy-Sue places her case on the scales and it reads 51lbs, the maximum free baggage allowance. However, when Hank puts his bag on the scales, it weighs 100lbs, in other words it is 49lbs overweight. The check-in representative explains that he has to pay for additional weight and our man from the Sunshine State gulps and asks how much. The check-in girl replies: "Well, excess baggage charges are based on 1.5% of the highest normal direct adult one way Premium Economy (W class) fare irrespective of the fare paid by yourself, and are per kg excess. The base W class one way fare from Tampa to Gatwick is $1391.00 and your bag is the equivalent of 22.2 kg overweight so that makes the total additional collection $463.50, sir." Well, when Hank digests this news he gets as mad as a bottle of fish. "You gotta be goddam crazy! If you think I'm gonna pay you four hundred and sixty bucks think again, lady!" he rants. However, the airline rep politely and calmly explains that the greater the weight on board the aircraft, the more fuel is required to get it off the ground and keep it airborne and since fuel is the airline's greatest single expense, the additional cost of transporting a passenger's overweight baggage is passed on to the passenger to whom the baggage belongs. But Hank is having none of it. "Listen, honey, look at this pig in pantyhose here," he says, pointing to his wife, "Wanna know how much she weighs? Well, I'll tell ya! She weighs 349lbs, the greedy fat cow. So to fly this sweating great pile of flab and her bag to London is going to weigh the ‘plane down a total of 400lbs. Now I weigh 140lbs and my bag weighs 100lbs so that's a total of 240lbs, but it's me, not her, you want to charge for extra fuel. Now that's just plain wrong, sweetie-pie." http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com... (Hank makes his point...) http://embed.maxim.com... (...while, Krissy-Sue makes her way to the departures lounge…) http://www.japanprobe.com... (…for a pre-flight snack) However, when it was further explained to him that scheduled airlines are governed by International Air Transport Association (IATA) regulations, which dictate that while airlines are permitted to charge extra for overweight baggage, they are not allowed to charge extra for overweight people, Hank eventually accepted that he had no choice but to pay the airline the extra money. http://www.iata.org... But is that fair? Why should passengers with a normal body mass index be made to contribute towards the cost of overweight passengers' tickets? http://www.travel-rants.com... (Overweight passengers pass the time by laughing in the faces of the normal people who subsidised their vacation) It would clearly be absurd to expect normal customers in a restaurant to part finance overweight diners' meals, so why is it that normal folk have to subsidise fat passengers' airfares? IATA should review its policies and instruct the airlines to weigh passengers and their luggage together in order to determine if a charge for excess weight is due. Thank you.