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Things Don't Add Up With Luggage Scales At DIA

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Nov 19, 2008 9:43 pm US/Mountain

Things Don't Add Up With Luggage Scales At DIA

Written by Rick Sallinger
DENVER (CBS4) ― You carefully weigh your bag, head to the airport, but then you reach the counter, and bad news -- the bag is too heavy. You can either repack or pay a fee as heavy as the bag.

But how accurate are those luggage scales? CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger tried to find out. He reports that when travelers arrive at the airport there's something they ought to know besides what time their flight leaves.

He asked one passenger, "Do you know how much your luggage weighs?"

"No I don't sir," was the reply.

"No I don't know. It should be about 50 pounds," another answered.

Todd Wheeler, a passenger waiting for a flight said, "I got a tool box that weighs 80 pounds and a bag about 50 pounds."

Fifty pounds. That's the magic weight. Anything above that and travelers may be charged up to $125.

Just ask Kristin Keller. She was going on a month long business trip and the last thing she wanted was to be charged for overweight luggage. So she bought a small digital scale to weigh her bag.

"I just kept re-weighing at home to 50 pound mark, about, and I actually made it 49.6 when I left my home," Keller said.

But each time she would check her bag with the same contents at the airport, the scales weighed it differently.

"Unfortunately, when I got to the international check-in counter in Sydney, Australia, I was shocked that it was flashing "over" on the scale and they said, 'Sorry, you're going to have to pay the overage fee,'" Keller added.

CBS4 weighed her suitcase using her digital scale. It was more than a pound under the limit. We then went to see if the airline scales were consistent -- as they should be.

All the indoor scales seemed to weigh her bag as under the limit, but then Sallinger went outside to curbside check in, the bag was suddenly overweight.

One Sallinger checked showed the luggage weighed more than 50 pounds.

Nicolas Brechun oversees the 12-state inspectors for the Colorado Department of Agriculture who make sure the scales are accurate. CBS4 requested their records for the past year.

United at DIA this past September had four violations on its scales.

"'Out of tolerance.' That means the device did not pass the inspection," Brechun said.

At Grand Junction's Walker Field Skywest, two scales were out of tolerance.

Actually Colorado's airports aren't so bad.

What about those traveling home from south Florida? Records there showed 1 in 4 scales had weight-related test failures.

In Wisconsin 5 of 9 airports had scales that flunked.

In Dallas at Love Field in 2006, 40 percent were off by up to 14 pounds.

Surprised?

Passenger Todd Wheeler was when Sallinger asked, "What if I told you inspection records show that scales have been inaccurate all over the United States?"

"Sounds like somebody owes me some money," Wheeler laughed.

Other stories about inacurate scales:



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