Blizza Blizza

The National Transportation Safety Board is now recommending that airline passengers be weighed at least occasionally to account for potentially deadly differences between the “standard” weight of a passenger (currently 185 pounds in winter) and the actual weight of the passenger.

I have a brilliant solution or two.

Solution One (lowest-tech, easiest to implement): Put a scale at the security checkpoint. Anyone who gets pulled aside for a more personal security inspection also gets weighed automatically. If the daily mean of weights is more than, say, five pounds above “standard,” all outgoing flights scheduled for the next day are notified so the weight and balance calculations can be adjusted.

Solution Two (medium-tech, somewhat tougher to implement): Put a boarding pass reader at the security checkpoint and build a scale into the platform beneath the metal detector. Build a scale into the X-ray machine as well. Passengers scan their boarding passes in order to pass through the metal detector, where they are weighed. A computer compiles weights of all passengers and carry-on baggage for that specific flight and allows the crew of that flight to make weight and balance adjustments as needed.

Solution Three (high-tech, could be tricky, but extremely accurate): Put RFID tags in boarding passes and luggage tags. These RFID tags will be encoded with flight information. When they pass a scale, they send their ID to the scale and the scale weighs the object passing over it. Like in solution two, a computer would compile this data and warn airline staff if any adjustments needed to be made. This could be combined in part with the scale-in-X-ray from solution two, or a new regulation could be implemented requiring passengers to affix RFID-containing tags to their carry-on baggage as well.