Poll: Airline Passengers Should Pay By the Pound

Forty percent of Americans believe that airline passengers should be weighed before getting on a plane—and then charged or seated differently according to their weight—according to a poll by Internet market research group YouGov, NBC reports.

"The airlines are always looking to reduce weight or the cost of carrying it," YouGov senior vice president Ray Martin says, "and we're finding that more people don't seem to mind the concept."

One airline, Somoa Air, has already instituted such a change, charging passengers 93 cents to $1.06 per kilogram.

But this kind of fee structure would also have to result in a change in seating, according to Peggy Howell, a spokesperson for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “Flight carriers don't try to fit a big box into a space the size of a 17-inch seat," she told NBC News. "Are airlines going to reconfigure their planes so you have a small, medium, and large seats for passengers of different weights? Anything else would be discriminatory."