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| Airlines confront too-fat-to-fly pa |
| Airlines confront too-fat-to-fly passengers
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 26-February-2010
3:57:57 AM |
| Flying in coach is never comfortable, but it's getting downright awkward for bigger passengers as airlines increasingly single out customers they deem too fat to fly.
The issue made headlines in early February, when the director Kevin Smith, best known for "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy," was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, California, because the crew determined he was too big. Smith turned to his Twitter account to vent: "I broke no regulation, offered no 'safety risk' (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was wrongly ejected from the flight."
Southwest, like most of the major U.S. carriers, has had a formal policy in place for years requiring that passengers who can't physically fit into a single airline seat must buy two.
Though such rules have long been denounced as discriminatory by advocates for the obese, they have gained the support of fliers who believe charging passengers who take up more room than the average person is only fair. Regardless of which side of the debate you are on, shrinking airline capacity has aggravated the issue with passengers of all sizes facing more tightly packed flights and cramped seating.
"I fly coast to coast several times a year, and I cannot tell you how many times I have been pinned in by a morbidly obese human," said Mark Sweeting, a frequent flier from Portland, Oregon, who says he used to request an exit row seat for the extra legroom, but that he now avoids that row having noticed that large passengers often request those seats for the same reason. "I don't know what the correct solution is," he said, "But it is a real problem."
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