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“Hey SouthwestAir: you bring that same row of seats to the ‘Daily Show’ and I’ll sit in ‘em for all to see on TV ... If I don’t fit, I’ll donate $10K to charity of your choice. But when I do (& buckle the belt as well)? 1) You admit you lied. 2) Change your policy, or at least re-train your staff to be a lot more human and a lot less corporate.”-- PopCrunch
Missed the flap? Gawker grabbed the pertinient stuff from Smith's Twitter stream, including this gem.
Hey @SouthwestAir! I've landed in Burbank. Don't worry: wall of the plane was opened & I was airlifted out while Richard Simmons supervised.
And Southwest's response is here. Southwest has long had the unfortunately named "Customers of Size" policy.
You've read about these situations before. Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago. The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling.
Perhaps the best take I've seen on the whole mess comes from Backpacking Dad. [Read the whole post for the hilarious babies in a bar analogy.]
Someone has decided that airplanes shouldn’t carry seats that are large enough to accommodate passengers above an arbitrary size limit. Someone made that choice. They may not have been thinking “Screw you, fatties!” when they did it, and in fact they probably just thought “More customers!!” But we are allowed to ask if the airlines are doing the right thing in addition to asking if they are doing the profitable thing.
I also really like Roaming Tales' letter to the airlines. [Again, read the whole thing.]
If you were truly concerned about my comfort, then you would also ban tall people (who can take up just as much space without being fat), men who spread their legs, children who kick the back of the seat, screaming babies, people who recline the seat when I’m eating my meal, people who complain about me reclining the seat when the meal service is over, people who blind me by opening the window shades at the wrong time, and people with excessive flatulence.
I'm going to editorialize for a minute. Airline seats are too small. I'm 5'2" and while certainly I could drop a little weight, I'm not obese. And I think airplane seats are too small. A tall person who's nowhere near overweight but is over six feet certainly finds the legroom challenging. And I took a flight recently where I could not stop ogling (I'm only human) the strapping athlete in the bulkhead row. A picture of fitness (my, my), and really too big for a coach seat. That human wasn't too big, the seat was too small.
Some respondents to the poll said it was airlines' responsibility to make seats for all shapes and sizes of passengers while others suggested that the charge should be calculated on the weight of the passenger plus their luggage. -- Airwise
There are no elegant solutions to this issue. Airlines are continually cramming additional seats into cabin configurations in pursuit of additional income. Sadly, it almost always turns into an "attack the fat guy" debate -- which, in additional to being insensitive, is beside the point and doesn't address the case at hand: A person is deemed too large for the flight, now, today, this minute. If this kind of screening is going to happen, I'm wondering why it doesn't happen discretely at the gate or at the ticket purchase point. Though I have to admit, the idea of seeing an option checkbox that says "I'm Fat" [Yes/No] or having to enter your weight when buying a ticket online leaves me cold.
Changing how we pay for airfare could improve the lives of everyone who travels by air. Let me propose one big improvement. Instead of the flat per-seat fare (plus extra fees for checked baggage), charge each passenger for the total weight he/she contributes to the weight of the plane. That's body weight plus luggage weight. -- This Young Economist
What's the solution? I don't know. Charging by weight penalizes passengers like that stunning athlete while not providing any additional space. Requiring a
