Airline Charges By Weight, Discrimination???

Subconsciously I am writing about this because I am flying today!  Instead of the dreaded weigh-in at your doctor's appointment or Weight Watcher’s meeting, you now could have a new place to hate the scale: The airport. Samoa Air has become the first airline in the world to introduce a "pay as you weigh" price plan for its passengers.

In an era where huge baggage fees and and two-seat purchase policies for some overweight passengers are the norm, this could seem like a good solution. "People have always traveled on the basis of of their seat, but as any airplane operator knows, airplanes don't run on seats, they run on weight," Chris Langton, CEO of Samoa Air, told  ABC Radio in an interview.

Samoa Air is a smaller airline serving the South Pacific region with planes that hold fewer passengers than major international airlines. "Particularly the smaller the aircraft that you're in, the less variance you can accept in terms of the differences of weights between passengers," Langston added in the interview.

Not helping the issue, Pacific Islanders are a notoriously overweight population. With 80.4 percent of Samoans having a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher it is the sixth fattest nation in the world, according to Forbes.  Hum!  What do you think?