There’s this article:
http://tristatehomepage.com/content/fulltext/?cid=7132
Setting passenger airfares the same way air freight charges are calculated — by weight — may not be so far-fetched as the airline industry grapples with surging fuel costs.
<> A lot of people would have problems with this. It certainly wouldn’t make my flying any cheaper. However, the simple fact is that the fuel consumption of an aircraft is based in part on the weight of the aircraft; a jetliner filled with fatties hauling a quarter ton of luggage each is not going to be able to fly as far or as fuel efficiently as the same plane filled with waifs with no luggage. And as fuel prices increase, the price of a ticket will increase. The options are thus to either increase everyones ticket price, or to charge people an appropriate fee based on their impact to the planes fuel use.
<> When suborbital and especially orbital tourism comes on-line, this sort of things will *have* to be instituted. When it comes to space travel, mass is everything. A ship loaded with lardasses might not even make it to orbit, and will instead come crashing down in, say, sub-Saharan Africa. And that would be just plain inconvenient.
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