By Chris Bucholtz

Back in the early days of aviation, when aircraft engines were less powerful and engineering types ran things, there was one airline that had a prominent scale right at the front of the checkout counter. Every passenger had to step up and be weighed; the total weight would determine just how many people and how much cargo could safely be carried. The safety aspect makes sense, but the idea of weighing people in front of their fellow passengers is pretty awful. This airline, like many others, died out or was acquired. As technology progressed and aircraft gained more capabilities, airlines learned they could estimate the average weight of their passengers with reasonable accuracy and include a margin for error. The aircraft manufacturers also came up with the brilliant idea of sticking a weight gauge in the landing gear of the aircraft – in essence, planes today weigh themselves with no need to single out passengers for individual humiliation in the terminal.

The news came last week the United Airlines has refined this policy of humiliation by instituting a policy to force overweight passengers to pay for an extra seat if they couldn’t fit into a single seat, if they can’t lower the armrests, or if their seat belts won’t latch without connector belts (little add-in sections that snap onto the ends of the belts). If there are no side-by-side seats on a flight, the “offender” will be offered two seats on the next flight. If that one’s not fully booked.

The horrifying thing about this policy is that United has figured out a way to shaft overweight passengers (and generate more revenue in the process) while maintaining a façade of inculpability – “oh, it’s not us, we’d happily let the heavy people fly. It’s those mean passengers sitting next to them! They’ll complain!” So, ostracize the large people, then shift the blame to the potential complainers - United’s recipe for better customer relationships!

Overweight people are indeed a hassle to sit next to on aircraft. But guess what: so am I. At six foot, 185 pounds, my shoulders tend to rub against other passengers when I get a middle seat. I think a lot of other normal-sized people also inadvertently commit “space violations” on aircraft. That is not because we’re all freaks – it’s because the airlines (and United in particular) have stuffed the maximum number of seats into their aircraft so as to maximize revenue per flight. I don’t enjoy sitting next to hugely obese people on an airplane, but I also don’t enjoy stuffing my own rear end into a seat designed for the average passenger in 1952 (which is when airlines standardized on seat sizes). Airbus (an appropriate name for a modern airliner if ever there was one) has a new aircraft, the A350, coming in 2013 designed for the larger people of today. If United’s a customer, I would assume it would figure out a way to short-circuit those design improvements and jam as many seats into the plane as possible. That’s just the way they roll.

Now, put this in CRM terms: United seems to think that it’s good for customer relationships to humiliate overweight passengers after they’ve boarded an aircraft because it thinks that will make other passengers happy. Somehow, I don’t think they quite grasp that those overweight people may have spouses or children with them, and that the story about how they were bounced from a flight because another passenger decided they were too fat would probably be repeated at great length among their peers (unless United thinks it would be so embarrassing no one would say a thing later). It ends up making United seem callous and arbitrary; at least the scales at the check-in counter were impartial and based on data.

I’m fairly sure people have become larger over the last 57 years, and it might make sense for airlines to take a changing world into consideration at some point. Of course, the major U.S. airlines have been notoriously inept at recognizing the need to change, so perhaps that’s unrealistic. But United’s attempt to target overweight people as the cause of passenger discomfort, when they fly their passengers around in cramped, over-stuffed airliners, is especially pathetic. It’s no wonder United is where it is financially when you realize how it treats its customers.