Bob McCarty Writes

Writing for Bloomberg News today, Michael Janofsky highlights the possibility that airlines might impose weight-based fares as a means of battling skyrocketing fuel costs. His article begins this way:

Imagine two scales at the airline ticket counter, one for your bags and one for you. The price of a ticket depends upon the weight of both.

That may not be so far-fetched.

In the next paragraph, he validates the legitimacy of such possibilities by citing an airline industry expert:

“You listen to the airline CEOs, and nothing is beyond their imagination,” said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. “They have already begun to think exotically. Nothing is not under the microscope.”

To the surprise of many, the airline sector won’t be the first in the travel industry to make passenger weight an important travel factor.

The National Park Service has, for years, imposed weight restrictions upon tourists hoping to ride mules at Grand Canyon National Park. The logic behind such policies stems from the fact that too much weight might break a mule’s back.

These days, it seems, the same logic might apply to the airline industry.

Cartoon courtesy Political Graffiti