> It ONLY is about properly distributing weight. It's not a fat tax.

Bogus. At best, "... yet."

Entire sports teams of children board planes filled with adults, without redistribution. They need to weigh every passenger now, just in case they might need to move that 1 larger person? If you buy that then I've got some oil you'd be interested in.

As far as I can tell, 1 commercial plane in history has had an accident due to balance and only because of tragically bad maintenance at the same time.

This looks like one of the more obvious cases of groundwork being laid for future fees veiled in safety concerns.

The bottom line for me personally is that it's just one more bullshit thing to endure when traveling via plane, and I'm biased against them at this point. Airlines are the skeeziest companies in their attempts to capture market surplus.

On smaller aircraft, this is standard operating procedure.

The Norwegian regional carrier Widerøe (Whose slogan might well have been "We proudly fly where everyone else is scared s--tless to!", operating a fleet of small to mid-size aircraft always play a game of musical chairs in their smaller (<40pax or so) planes prior to takeoff.

Edit: Ninja'd by gragas.

If you live in a smaller city, you'd know that this happens all the time. Nearly half the time when I fly on a tiny CRJ to and from my local airport, after everyone boards, the pilot will ask if three or four people could shift around (for weight reasons) before takeoff.

I'm talking about a hypothetical where an airline might weigh people so they can charge differently based on passenger weight (to account for differences in fuel consumption), not just in order to reassign seats to balance weight distribution. Which is what this particular subthread happens to be talking about.

Not a hypothetical at all; the article mentions Samoa Air does charge based on weight.