blog.andrewsteele.co.uk

I’m flying to Dinard (some tiny airport in Brittany [link requires Google Earth]) on Monday on a holiday-type venture. It’s my first trip on a plane, and consequently my first attempt to make my baggage fit to the bizarrely-prescribed limits imposed.

Now, I can see why this is necessary; to offer flights to and from France for £9.99, even if the taxes, fees, charges and clearly-fabricated “Aviation / WCHR Levy” do bring it up to sixty quid, you must operate to a fairly tight budget. (I’m normally a great fan of the <acronym> tag, allowing you to see what an acronym stands for if you hover your mouse over it, but have omitted it in this case because I strongly suspect it stands for something fatuous by way of excusing the new and exciting method of profiteering they’ve found…)

Thus, I surmise, they’ve got a team of statisticians working out just how many people and bags they can expect to cram onto a plane such that they only have to leave 1% behind, given the mean and standard deviation of the mass of persons and baggage. This allows them to get pretty well everyone on the aircraft, financially compensate the odd person who has to miss out, and still turn a nice profit. They make money, I get cheap flights.

Result? Not quite.

I’m not annoyed that they restrict me to 15kg of baggage; frankly, my few experiments popping things on the bathroom scales has demonstrated that I’d need to take more than my entire wardrobe in a lead-lined bag to exceed that. Nor is 10kg of hand luggage restrictive; by the time I’m lugging 25kg of luggage around, I should (were it for an employer) have taken a Health and Safety course in manual handling. And I don’t need the nanny state to tell me that 25kg is quite heavy.

What is slightly irksome, however, is their bizarre stipulation that my 10kg of hand-luggage should occupy no more than 55×40x20cm. Luckily, my rucksack just fits inside these limits, assuming I don’t pack it too tightly…and I would have to pack it fairly tightly to make something that small weigh in at 10 kilos.

Before I’d got the ruler out and measured my rucksack, however, the thought struck me as I imagined myself wearing my rucksack on my front, or sitting it atop my lap: I plus hand luggage probably occupy less space than quite a lot of fat people.

Indeed, me, my hand luggage and my stuff in the hold probably weigh less than quite a lot of fat people…let alone fat people bringing all those heavy baggy clothes and using up their whole baggage allowance!

So, it’s not fair. Those statisticians have had to take obese people into account when determining how many people we can let the plane safely take off, and so, whether it be through decreased baggage allowance or increased fares, Mr “BMI 24.8 - normal” Statto pays through the nose.

I wonder if there’s any cash to be made in setting up an airline which gives every customer a “person plus baggage” allowance. It’d certainly have to have a slight amount of flexibility; men and women, for example, would certainly need different limits. It’d be wonderfully un-PC, and perhaps generate a good amount of publicity for it. Perhaps fat people would be too offended or inconvenienced to use it: all the better for squeezing on more lightweight slim passengers and turning a larger profit! It might even compel the ostracised overweight to lose some, increasing their life span.

I can see the offended fingers being pointed right now. But has anyone got a better plan for tackling the obesity crisis in the West?!

Well… Oil prices are at an all-time high. Fat burns quite well.

I wonder if lipids power turbofan engines as efficiently as kerosene….

Friday, September 2nd, 2005 23:32 | permalink | trackback