Airlines could soon start secretly weighing you

Airlines could soon begin discreetly weighing their customers as a way to save on fuel costs. This is the message coming from a British startup, which aims to help the airlines find this information in a non-intrusive fashion.

According to Lonely Planet, Fuel Matrix, a startup founded by CEO Roy Fuscone, aims to use methods like pressurized pads at self-service bag drops or during full body scans to collect data on passenger’s weight. Much like with facial recognition technology, the pads will confidentially send data to the airlines alone for the purposes of fuel economy.

Currently, airlines use a calculation that allows 93kg for each man and 75kg for women to determine how much fuel they need to load. Understandably, this can be highly inaccurate and in an industry that works on small margins as airlines do, more accuracy means more savings.

Nick Brasier, COO of Fuel Matrix, told the Independent that the company estimates most flights carry about 1% more fuel than they need and burn about 0.3% to 0.5% more fuel due to the extra fuel weight.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.