Should airlines start weighing passengers? It’s right to make fat people pay extra to fly – they’re worse than screaming babies, says Roger Lewis. But Marion McGilvary disagrees. Who do YOU agree with? Have your say in our poll

Airliner Finnair is proposing to weigh its passengers at the departure gate.

So should airliners start making customers step on the scales before boarding or is the measure simply a heavy load of fat shaming? 

Our writers weigh in on whether the policy should be adopted.

Yes: Roger Lewis

One thing we all hate is to be on a busy, no-frills flight only to find the obligatory fatso, the one who works as a decoy for a whaling fleet, who pounds up the aisle carrying snacks and fizzy pop, making a beeline for the adjacent seat.

Once ensconced, they find they can’t get their seat belt fastened, the tray table won’t go down, their bulk pushes the armrest into your ribs and — should you need to ask them to move so you can get to the lavatory — forget it.

Fat people on planes are worse than screaming babies.

Goodness knows what would happen in an emergency. When forced to abandon their burgers, I can’t imagine the type of passenger considered to be ‘volumetric’ (a coinage used by British Airways to describe the traveller who gets wedged in their seat) will be a natural at hastening along the cabin floor, finding the exit and jumping onto the inflatable slide — which, let’s face it, would need to be made in Scotland from girders to cope with their weight.

Nor will the life jackets fit round their bulging necks.

It doesn’t help that airlines are cramming an increasing number of ‘slimline’ seats into Economy sections — easyJet’s have a width of 17.5 inches, which is surely supermodel size.

So unsuitable is this stricture for those of a greater girth that airlines such as Air France are encouraging the stout to purchase an extra seat ‘if your build does not permit you to sit comfortably in a single seat’.

And this week it emerged that Finnair is proposing to tackle the extra pounds by weighing its passengers at the departure gate. Humiliating? Undoubtedly.

But I approve — and I speak as someone who has been there.

In the years before I suffered a heart attack in a Morrisons’ car park last summer and had to be airlifted to hospital, I was that decoy for the whaling fleet. It’s a surprise the air ambulance helicopter got off the ground.

A spokesman for Finland’s national carrier says that, far from persecuting the weighty traveller, its plan to bring out the scales is simply ‘to better estimate the weight of the plane’s cargo before take-off’, adding that ‘our customers have taken it really positively so far’.

Well, that won’t last. For this will clearly embarrass the elephantine.

What if a seriously obese passenger turns up? Will a klaxon sound?

Will they be escorted away by armed guards and barking dogs and told through a loud-hailer to go and catch a bus instead? Whatever, I’m in favour.

It’s not just that it might help the check-in clerks to distribute the weight a bit, so the plane won’t tilt or fail to rise off the runway, it will also put pressure on everyone to slim down and do their bit for the environment.

Heavy planes need more fuel and emit more CO2.

I’d go further. Raise the ticket price in line with the rising pounds and ounces. We might get better service from the extra airline revenue as well as more room while we’re eating our in-flight lunch. Because there are quite a few pounds to be made.

The NHS reckons 26 per cent of the populace are obese. Men’s collars are too tight, women’s jackets won’t button up and, if they look down, neither sex can see their shoes.

That’s a lot of folk who’ll face being fat-shamed at airports and could pay extra for their self-indulgence.

It’s true, fat people don’t like being told they’re fat. I used to take umbrage when somebody said, ‘You’re looking well!’ because what they really meant was, ‘You’ve been eating all the pies’.

People of the ample persuasion prefer to say they are big-boned, fuller-figured and have slower metabolisms. Or it’s their glands.

They don’t wish to be asked if their clothes are made by a quantity surveyor.

I had a fat friend who had lunch before he went out for lunch.

When he visited South Wales, people used to shout, ‘Oi, Pavarotti!’ which upset him rather.

I used to say: ‘Ignore them, you’re bigger than that.’ A joke which upset him all the more.

For the thing is you can’t but notice corpulence. It is hardly an invisible affliction, like deafness. Yet doctors pussy-foot around the issue, failing to come clean by telling patients they are fat pigs. Instead they go on about high blood pressure or cholesterol, then proceed to prescribe statins and soluble aspirins.

A klaxon at the airport scales might be a more efficacious method to adopt — tough love, so to say.

There are some who wonder whether our girth ought to be declared to HMRC.

Porkers, they say, should pay extra tax to fund their knee and hip operations and pay for the side-effects of type 2 diabetes, etc.

I believe this policy was seriously discussed by Tony Blair’s government but vetoed by his overweight deputy, John Prescott.

I would not go that far, for I have a residual fondness for the blobby fraternity.

Yes, they cost the country billions with their sick pay and incapacity benefits. They have breathing difficulties and heart disease, and take up all the room on the airplane — but, on the other hand, they are funnier than anybody.

Where would we be without Oliver Hardy, John Candy or Les Dawson and his Roly-Polys, the dance troupe of larger ladies?

As Les Dawson’s character Cissie said to Roy Barraclough’s Ada: ‘Did you see his bean sprout?’

‘It’s a wonder he’s got the energy,’ came the reply.

Such comedians evidently had or have a huge appetite — an appetite for life itself, a zest. Another vivacious star with weight issues was Elizabeth Taylor, who went in for kaftans and shape-concealing cloaks, which fooled nobody. Joan Rivers was merciless: ‘Her blood group is ragu.’

But when these larger-than-life individuals heave their way to the neighbouring seat on the airplane it is no laughing matter.

And I’m talking as someone who’s seen the apprehension in a passenger’s eyes as I approached them in my pomp. Eyes that were saying: ‘Oh, God. Not him!’

• Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton And Elizabeth Taylor, by Roger Lewis (Quercus) is out now.

No: Marion McGilvary

Well, that’s Finland off my holiday list! The country’s national airline Finnair has announced a new policy to weigh customers at check-in so they can ensure a safe take-off and better ‘balance the plane’.

A ‘voluntary’ option (for now), the airline claims it’s a measure that will be applied discreetly for everyone’s benefit.

Odd, I’ve never noticed planes listing precariously above Heathrow because all the heavy people were seated on one side of the aisle. But perhaps too many Finnish folk are overly fond of chips, and the airborne security of their nation is at stake.

Frankly, I don’t care what excuse ‘Thinnair’, as it’s been dubbed, comes up with for doing this, I’d rather chew off my own arm than submit to being weighed in public.

Currently a size 18, I’d probably have to gnaw off more than one limb to avoid being selected for any special treatment: ‘Actually, madam, we think you’d be better off on the next flight.’

It all smacks of customer humiliation, doesn’t it?

Even if, as they claim, the system will be totally anonymous and only check-in staff will see your magic number, one’s weight — like one’s politics and religion — is something you simply don’t divulge in polite society.

I don’t want anybody to know how high the needle goes when I stand on the scales, and never have done — even at my thinnest.

My partner doesn’t know how much I weigh, so why on earth should Helmi from Helsinki?

After all, weight is such an emotive subject. For most, it is a well-travelled land full of pitfalls, traps and self-loathing.

Indeed, there is barely a woman I know who is not on some sort of diet or weight-loss and gym regimen, regardless of their size.

I recently found a diary I kept 25 years ago and even then I was worrying, nay obsessing, about my weight — considering myself fat when I was a size 12 and, frankly, pretty damn hot.

Now my bathroom scales have been banished to the garden shed and I’m only ever hot when I’ve been pushing the Dyson around the house.

I’m at the stage of being terrified I will need to ask for a seat belt extension on a plane (so far so good — thanks to Spanx).

Yes, my swimsuit years are behind me, and no, my idea of a holiday is never going to include standing in line clutching my passport, waiting, along with my fellow passengers, to be weighed.

But it’s voluntary, Finnair reassure us. This is disingenuous too, for what woman (or man, for that matter) will want to make a fuss by refusing to step on the scales in front of a queue of people, especially if they are on the chubby side.

Of course, the happily thin will say that weighing passengers is not a new idea. Back in the 1920s, in the fledgling years of air travel when planes were less robust, they routinely weighed passengers before boarding.

But they did a lot of things back then — like thinking smoking was good for you and that casual sexual harassment was complimentary.

Supposedly we’ve moved on, so please don’t try to pretend there’s an historical excuse for this.

What’s next, I ask myself?

Will they calorie count the in-flight snacks and serve Slimfast instead of sandwiches?

And how will this new system work? Do they turn you away if the plane is full of hefty rugby players or put out a Tannoy message asking for passengers under 8 st to please come forward to the desk?

One friend suggested they should weigh people with their hand luggage and give everyone the same allowance. This would mean that she, a wisp of a thing, could pack bricks into her wheelie case, while I’d be carrying a purse with a spare pair of pants. I don’t think so.

Then she suggested having different tiers for men and women, according to their height. Again, no.

Maybe you could self-select your body type when doing an online check-in, using euphemisms such as ‘slim’ for bony, and ‘voluptuous’ for the chubsters?

Why, if this is such an important factor in air travel, hasn’t any other airline tried it yet?

Budget carriers, with their fees for everything from seat choice to using a credit card, would surely love to monetise our, ahem, excess baggage. Ryanair has been threatening to charge £1 to use the loos on flights for years, so weighing-in sounds right up its gangway.

Gone would be the practice of wearing your entire wardrobe so you can save on hand luggage.

Now you’d be starving yourself for the week before the holiday, forgoing underwear and insisting on removing your shoes before stepping on the scales.

In fact, surely it’s only a matter of time before Finnair, and all the fellow airline industry money-grabbers, slap on a fat tax and charge us by the kilo.

It’s a shame, because I did have plans to see the Northern Lights in Finland. I had assumed that all those chaps in chunky Scandinavian knits with sufficient body fat to ward off the cold would maybe welcome a well-upholstered woman to share the long arctic nights with. But they can weep into their glögg at this rate.

Oh, Finnair, what have you started?

You’re based in what is supposed to be the happiest country in the world, home to the glorious pastime of päntsdrunk, which is exactly what it sounds like — relaxing by sitting around in your underwear slugging down alcohol.

This we like. This we will happily do. But being publicly fat-shamed at the airport? Nope — there is not enough booze in the world.