Dr Eva: ‘I am so proud Finland is weighing f lyers’
WEIGHT loss expert Dr Eva Orsmond has said she is ‘very proud’ of her homeland, after a Finnish airline announced it will weigh its passengers.
As the Irish Daily Mail reported last week, Finland’s flagship carrier Finnair said it began ‘measuring’ passengers departing from Helsinki on Monday.
The airline is to weigh passengers – with their carry-on luggage – before they board ‘to better estimate the plane’s weight before take-off’. But hopping on the scales will be entirely voluntary.
A spokesman for the airline, which flies 13 times a week from Dublin to the Finnish capital, said: ‘So far, more than 500 volunteer customers have participated in the weigh-ins.’
Dr Orsmond – a former consultant on the RTÉ weight loss show Operation Transformation – has welcomed the news.
‘I think it’s very good that we’re starting to do this. It obviously makes sense that we know, more or less, what people weigh because people are getting heavier.
‘We know that being overweight and obesity is increasing… It’s affecting now the safety of air travel,’ she told Newstalk.
To some it may seem like unnecessary hassle at the airport and travel expert Eoghan Corry says for that reason it ‘won’t take-off’ as a standard part of boarding.
He said: ‘When your aircraft isn’t full you have to strategically position your passengers for safety and fuel burn, so you have an even weight distribution so it doesn’t stress the aircraft in turbulence.
‘Michael O’Leary, being Michael O’Leary, talked about it. “Why are we charging extra for overweight bags when we should be charging extra for excess-weight passengers?” Fortunately it was designed just to create headlines.
‘Excess-weight passengers are an issue but nobody’s going to touch it because it’s in the fat-shaming area,’ said Mr Corry.
But Dr Orsmond said the weight of passengers can make a huge difference to a jet’s efficiency.
‘There’s 200 people in a plane, if every single one of them was ten kilos heavier than we are expecting them to be, that would be 2,000 kilos more in the plane.
‘If there’s 200 passengers and they are 20 kilos each heavier that would mean 4,000 more kilos in that aeroplane. So, clearly those figures would make a difference to the aeroplane.’
Dr Orsmond said she hopes that the move makes people think
Hopes the move makes people think
about how their weight impacts others around them.
‘If my luggage is three or four kilos too heavy, I have to pay quite heftily for it, whereas someone the same age and height could be ten or 20 kilos heavier and they don’t have to pay,’ she said.
Finnair said airlines calculate the weight of the plane, its interior and passengers on board to balance the flight and make it safe.
Airlines may use average weights – assumed to be 88kg per person – or collect their own data, it said.
Ryanair and Aer Lingus were both contacted for comment.