Obesity pushes up flight costs

HEAVY suitcases aren’t the only things weighing down aeroplanes and requiring them to burn more fuel, pushing up the cost of flights.

A new US government study reveals that airlines increasingly have to worry more about the weight of their passengers.America’s growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airline companies as the extra kilos on passengers are causing a drag on planes.Heavier fliers have created heftier fuel costs, according to the government study.Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 4.5kg, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $US275 million ($364 million) to burn an additional 1.4 billion litres of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.”The obesity epidemic has unexpected consequences beyond direct health effects,” said Dr Deron Burton of the CDC.”Our goal was to highlight one area that had not been looked at before.”The extra fuel burned also had an environmental impact, as an estimated 3.8 million extra tonnes of carbon dioxide were released into the air, according to the study.The agency said its calculations are rough estimates, issued to highlight previously undocumented consequences of the ongoing obesity epidemic.The estimates were calculated by determining how much fuel the extra 4.5kg per passenger represented in Department of Transportation airline statistics, Burton said.Obesity is a life-or-death struggle in the United States, the underlying cause of 400,000 deaths in 2000, a 33 per cent jump from 1990.If current trends persist, it will become the nation’s number one cause of preventable death, the CDC said earlier this year.More than half – 56 per cent – of US adults were overweight or obese in the early 1990s, according to a CDC survey.That rose to 65 per cent in a similar survey done from 1999 to 2002. (Source: Associated Press, Nov 2004)