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Wrestling passengers onto planes is better than scales

What will they come up with next? First they search the passengers, then the suitcases. Now they want to charge for in-flight meals.<br>
I don’t know what airlines could do to make flying more annoying. Now I see that commuter airlines are planning to weigh the passengers before boarding the plane. Federal officials have decided that weight estimates for passengers and baggage might be out of date.<br>
Weighing luggage is one thing, but running passengers over the scales seems a bit cruel to me. There must be less intrusive ways of checking the load on an airplane. They could have one big scale for all the passengers, or weigh randomly, like they do the search – pretend they can’t tell the big ones from the little ones.<br>
The whole thing reminds me of the days when we loaded pigs on the truck and took them to market. We never had a scale in those days, so everything was based upon some sort of guesstimate.
When sale day arrived, my brothers and I would herd all of the market hogs into a large pen. Then, we would try to determine which ones would make market weight.<br>
The market wanted 200- to 220-pound hogs in those days, and the only method we had for loading the truck was to grab a pig and wrestle him aboard. Two kids could handle a pig of 180 pounds or so, but it took all three of us to deal with the 200-pounders.<br>
That became our criterion: If two of us could handle the pig, he went back to the feeding pen and stayed another week or two. If it took all three to subdue the critter, we dragged him onto the truck and took him to market.<br>
Wrestling pigs isn’t the only way to sort them, of course. Two boys in my vocational-ag class taught me that several years later.<br>
These fellows built a sturdy panel with vertical slots to fit across an alley inside their barn. Through considerable trial and error, they determined the exact width of slot that a 200-pound pig would fit through, but that a 210-pounder would not.<br>
Then, all they had to do was chase the pigs to one end of the alley and close the panel. Once the panel was secured behind the pigs, the boys would sic the dog on them, and the pigs ran back through the panel into the feeding pen.<br>
A pig weighing less than 210 pounds went through slick as a whistle. Anything over that remained in the alley and went to the sale.<br>
It’s obvious to me that airlines don’t have to weigh the passengers. These new security measures have filled airports with more government employees than anyone knows what to do with. The most humane way to determine which passengers are overweight is to have two or three security people wrestle them into a holding area.<br>
If two employees can subdue the passenger, that person should be loaded on the plane. If it takes three or more, the passenger is too big and needs to wait for a later flight.<br>
Or, what about the slotted-panel trick? Everyone walks through those metal detectors, anyway – just narrow them down a little.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.

1/30/2008