American Airlines: You Cannot Be Serious?

Continuing the airline pricing theme from one of last weeks posts, I stumbled across this story about American Airlines. I still cannot decide if it is actually a joke or not because it sounds absurd. I cannot really get to grips with this article but it seems as though American Airlines are charging surcharges to customers who are not even flying. This quote is taken from theonion.com:

"Tough times unfortunately mean tough measures," American Airlines president Gerard Arpey said."It's never an easy decision to ask our loyal customers, as well as thousands of people chosen at random out of a telephone book, to pay a little extra, but that's just the reality of today's economic climate. We hope all Americans will understand this when receiving one of our new bills in the mail."

The rest of the article can be found at the link below so please tell me what is going on? Is this a joke or do American airlines seriously think people are going to pay?

Rest of Article