EDITORIAL – Passengers weighing down airplanes

Americans are apparently bringing more excess baggage onto planes than they were a decade… Americans are apparently bringing more excess baggage onto planes than they were a decade ago — in the form of added weight. The obesity epidemic has hit this country in a big way, with the average American weighing 10 pounds more than he or she did in the ’90s. But now, according to a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, the epidemic is weighing heavily on airlines as well.

Wider people translate into having to use more fuel, and the airlines have had to eat the cost, spending $275 million on 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000, the CDC reported. And as a super-sized bonus, the extra fuel produced 3.8 million extra tons of carbon dioxide, which, in addition to being the stuff we exhale, is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

Now the airlines have had to tighten their belts in order to keep flying. With the price of fuel on the rise and the heftiness of the majority of Americans increasing, burger-by-burger, airlines will have to think of other ways to compensate for the rising costs and diminishing returns.

According to an Associated Press report, many already have, by switching from metal flatware to plastic and nixing thick in-flight magazines — basically putting airplanes on the Atkins diet.

Of course, now that airlines have done the American thing and found a scapegoat to assign blame for rising costs, other industries might want to jump on the bandwagon.

Port Authority $30 million in the hole? Must be all the fat people weighing down the buses! Pitt raising tuition? The fat kids are breaking all the chairs!

And somehow, some way, someone will find a reason to sue McDonald’s over this.

Well, perhaps the airlines’ reason is valid — we have been going through a little waistline expansion.

But there’s not much they can do that wouldn’t lead to bloated prices, though “You must be this wide to ride this airplane” signs would give airports a carnival-like atmosphere. Flying post-Sept. 11, 2001, is already a hassle: first the metal detectors, then the terrorism detectors, now fat detectors?

At this rate, the only people who’ll be flying will have to be wearing plastic clothing, bedecked in American flag apparel and skinny as rails — in other words, the U.S. swim team. For all of us who aren’t competitive swimmers, well, we’ll have to walk.