Joe Bob's America - Big Bellies Go Belly Up?

Big Bellies Go Belly Up?

By Joe Bob Briggs
June 20, 2003

NEW YORK, June 20 (UPI) Is it really true that too many big bellies on an airplane can make the plane go belly up? That's what the FAA appears to be saying. They're altering their guidelines for "presumed average weight" of each passenger because they think an overabundance of flab may have knocked a plane out of the sky shortly after takeoff from Charlotte.

I mean, are the things that delicate? Isn't there already about nine million tons of steel slicing into the ether? I had assumed that mere corporeal flesh was a microscopic speck on the airborne payload.

Does this mean that if the whole country overeats in the winter, we end up with a spring full of plummeting fuselages and nose dives? It makes you think twice about packing those dumbbells into your suitcase and then sitting on it so it'll close, doesn't it?

Here's the math on this thing. Up until May the airlines were supposed to assume that each passenger weighed 180 pounds in summer and 185 in winter. (I'm not sure whether the extra five pounds represents the per capita consumption of holiday turkey or just the heft of a woolly overcoat.)

At any rate, they decided that's not enough. From now on the airlines are expected to count each adult passenger as 190 in summer and 195 in winter. This alone is a fairly frightening statistic. If you consider all the horse racing jockeys and petite Asian women who fly--none of whom could top 110 while wearing a suit of armor--you have to have a whole lot of 350- pound blubber tubs to get the average up that high.

(Southwest Airlines is looking a whole lot safer now, isn't it? Their Fat Flyer Policy requires the miraculously obese to purchase two seats instead of one.)

But it gets more complicated. Despite the popularity of cheap made-in-China cloth bags with the fiber heft of a gossamer wing, the FAA thinks the weight of the average bag should be upgraded as well--to 30 pounds instead of 25. Thinking back on my last gym workout, which sometimes makes use of 30-pound barbells, I would have to say a 30-pound bag average--which means there are plenty of fifty-pound bags out there--would mean that the nation is on the verge of major back-injury problems if we don't watch out. That is some SERIOUS heft.

Of course, I think everyone has stood at the luggage carousel and marveled at the family that unloads 19 bags, crates, boxes and duffels, including some tied with Turkish hemp and others clamped together with stout cordage from twisted metal wire. As the last chicken cage is hoisted on to the shoulders of the family patriarch, you have to occasionally think, "Did they pay for that? We could have died."

But if planes are so finicky, why not just weigh the luggage and, for that matter, weigh . . . the people?

I know I know I know, it'll embarrass the pregnant ladies and the regulars at the Waffle House. But couldn't we rig up some kind of "privacy scale"? You step on the platform, and the pounds avoirdupois are visible only to the ticket agent, who is properly trained to avoid chortles, low whistles, "my my mys," or the dreaded "Well, we'll just round that off at 300."

Actually, this is already written into the FAA guidelines. If you don't want to abide by the FAA weight rules--because, let's say, you're transporting a Little League team or a batch of Filipino brides--you can weigh each passenger or simply ask the passenger for his weight. (This sounds dangerous to me.)

Nobody does this, of course, because a) it pretty much rules out the self-service ticket machine, and b) it would piss people off, if for no other reason than it's one more line to stand in. It seems silly, though, to spend all this money and time on making sure that no crazed Yemenis with penknives hijack the plane, only to watch it go down because--whoops!--I thought you counted the opera singer.

But it turns out there are even more weight factors involved here. In the summer, for example, the air at ground level is thinner, so it takes a much longer runway to get airborne. It doesn't matter that much if you're grabbing the Prague redeye from Washington Dulles, but if you're in one of those little 12- seaters taking off from the mountaintop in Fayetteville, Arkansas, it could result in a sputter, a grinding of instruments, a little burp, and then a game of pick-up sticks in the Ozarks. At a simmering airport like Phoenix, they're so used to removing bags and people from overloaded flights that nobody's too surprised by it anymore. But when weight standards go up, you're going to have the same sort of offloading in Buffalo.

The FAA also has a weight standard for "personal items." Wanna take a guess on this one?

Ten pounds!

That would be your laptops, your cell phones, your purses, your diaper bags and, of course, your regulation squash rackets. I don't wanna say Americans are packrats, but there's a whole lot of obsessive gadget-hoarding going on on the modern airliner. Thank God the Japanese keep making electronics smaller.

I'm not sure what this all means, but even if they find out that Flight 5481 went down in Charlotte because of some more rational cause--like, say, popping rivets in the whirlygig stabilizer--I'm starting a new "eyes open" Behemoth Avoidance Travel Policy.

If you're boarding a plane in Palm Springs with the Bulgarian weightlifting team, you might want to take the next flight. I'll stick with the airport in Burlington, Vermont. It's always freezing and the population is full of pale vegetarian ectomorphs.

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