Korean Air is asking passengers to step on the scales before boarding

&gt; “On commercial aircraft, anything from a 737 and above you know, 120 people, we have it built in.”<p>No, you don&#x27;t. Airplanes are designed using a 75kg baseline per passenger, including luggage.<p>Now. Let&#x27;s assume that the engineers felt very generous during their payload estimates, and added a 10% buffer (Spoiler alert: they don&#x27;t). For a 737, with 170 passengers, that will be 1275kg. Taking the 2022 EASA passenger weight averages from the article, assuming a 50-50 male&#x2F;female passenger distribution, we get an average passenger weight of 75kg, without luggage. Further assuming an average of 10kg of luggage per passenger, we are now 1700kg overweight, which is almost half a ton over the (generous!) maximum payload estimates. And whilst the Europeans are getting notably heavier in recent times, they are not, by any means the heaviest demographic group on earth.<p>&gt; Overall, a significant weight increase per passenger would be eclipsed by the weight of fuel, cargo and the aircraft itself, said Hilderman. “Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight,” he said.<p>No, that&#x27;s not how it works at all. The fuel weight, and the aircraft weight are what they are for one reason, and one reason only. It is the smallest amount of weight the engineers could get away with to safely and economically transport a certain amount of payload (170 pax) over a chosen distance. Increase that payload by 10%, and you will quickly find out that you need a significantly bigger plane (fuselage, wing, engines, landing gear), and a significantly larger amount of fuel to carry the new payload over the same distance.<p>There are very real safety risks linked to carrying more payload than anticipated (or seriously unbalanced payload distributions) and being outraged about pseudo fat-shaming is not the right answer to this issue.

Also would like to point out that the general US populace has rolled over for a belly rub at this point to a full body scan, why not toss a scale in the mix? its no more invasive than what we currently endure for security theater

Wow, Hilderman&#x27;s quore is just factually incorrect where he says:<p>&quot;Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight&quot;<p>For most transport aircraft, passenger mass fraction is roughly 12%-18% depending on what&#x27;s included (cargo, seats, etc.), while fuel mass fraction is around 30% to 40%.<p>So this ratio is more like 2 or 3, not 20.<p>Passenger weight is absolutely a huge factor (speaking as an aerospace engineer focusing on vehicle design and flight performance).

The weight limits in planes are ridiculous anyway.<p>There was just a story about a woman who couldn&#x27;t get back from her 2 month vacation with her dog because the dog was 300 grams overweight as per the rules of the airline.<p>Meanwhile my fat ass can trounce on the plane and nobody will care as long as I fit in the seat. My carry-on also weighs at least 2 times what the poor dog did. Nobody bats an eye.<p>Either they need to waive the weight limits or use passenger+luggage as the weight limit.<p>(Yes I know an anvil in the overhead is dangerous and that&#x27;s why carry-ons have weight limits).

On small private planes this is already a requirement, and i think most ppl are quite happy to give their weight rather than take any risk of crashing

So it seems like this has all to do with safety, not fat shaming. In addition, they seem to only weigh once every 5 years. I&#x27;m all for it.

There is already a Larry David - Curb your enthusiasm episode on this one. I thought it was just Larry being Larry. But as the article suggests it was done only for a smaller planes not the large ones.

I&#x27;m not sure what to think of that. I see the economics and think it&#x27;s unfair that I subsidize unhealthy peoples. But then again there&#x27;s society, empathy, and solidarity.

It&#x27;s funny. I&#x27;m tall and fat, and I always buy two seats flying economy (and I&#x27;m completely fine with that). I weight more than 2 average passengers. Still, I believe when boarding they note down that one of my seats is &quot;extra&quot; and I believe this is for weight and balance reasons, i.e. they only count less than half of my weight (european low-end carrier).

Don’t the landing gear have sensors in them to measure how heavy the plane is?

I wonder how pissed Hilderman is right now over the editing of this piece and (presumably) the interview he gave?<p>His quotes seem to be all over the place. How can he both say &quot;it&#x27;s not reasonable to weight passengers for the purposes of safety&quot;, but also say &quot;periodic weight assessments can help airlines determine if weight estimates are still accurate&quot;, and then add in a non-sequitur about European privacy norms and then seat pitches??

Back in the 1980s, a desk clerk at the Dubuque airport weighed my luggage and then asked me my weight before she assigned my seat on a flight to Chicago. When I saw the size of the airplane (20 seats or so), I was not surprised. But that was for trim, not for cumulative weight.

Korean Air is the first airline where I had the experience of being forced to check a bag due to weight. I usually travel with a backpack and a carry on luggage, but Korea Air made me check the bag because the total weight for both bags exceeded a weight limit by 1KG.

Doing this purely based on kg seems kinda discriminatory. I mean, if you just happen to be large but by no means overweight... Wouldn&#x27;t BMI not be a more fairer way of measuring?

Instead of individual passengers, why not weigh everything together - passenger + luggage + carry-on + etc? That way you don&#x27;t have to embarrass some people.