<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Blumie:
Moreover, it is not practical to have a scale at every gate, so you'd have the issue of where to put it. Big airport have several departure runways, so unless you put a scale at each one, you would have planes taxing far out of their way to be weighed.</font>
You'd need two for each runway, on the taxiway before you hit the runway, basically to give the pilots an exact weight (which would be useful for punching in the computers found on most planes now) and to assure that it is not over its maximum takeoff weight.
The cost of installing two such scales would be relatively minor compared to the cost of the runway itself and associated taxiways.
One crash is too many because of an overweight plane is too many, and I can tell you for a fact that ERJ and CRJ are very weight sensitive and I'm sure the operators of those aircraft wouldn't mind having a more exact way to measure ...