Should fat people pay more?
 

Found this on a travel blog. Makes you wonder if they can pass rules for fees for first and second checked bags why they don't have a fee for oversized people?

*******************************
Passenger creates big debate at American - I mean big!

This is sent to me with the absolute assurance that it's a genuine picture taken by a flight attendant at American Airlines. The F/A took it to show her manager what was happening on the aircraft (757???) and why she was unhappy about it. Seems the guy paid for only one seat and the gate staff let him board.

You can see the F/A's point of view - how the heck is s(he) supposed to deal with it. Sympathise with the guy or not, he's a major safety hazard in an evacuation, a gross inconvenience for the cabin crew, and I would suggest a totally unacceptable travelling companion for the guy next to him.

I don't know what the actual outcome was but it seems unimaginable that he was allowed to fly in the end. Not that anything on a commercial airline is actually unimaginable, but close anyway.

That person left the realm of fat a long, long time ago. He needs a new category that sums up his state succinctly. Fat, as large as it is, doesn't cover it.

I remember a bogus ad campaign by a PR company to test the power of internet sites/ads.

They announced a new airline that priced tickets by the passenger pound....and it was carbon neutral...the heavier you and your luggage are, the more trees they would plant.

Fly Derrie-Air -- "Pack Less, Weigh Less, Pay Less"

It goes on to explain how Dick Derrie, the founder, came up with the idea:
Some people loved it and were ready to book their next flight on Derrie-Air...others were outraged.

Derrie-Air My Derriere

While I'm not as fat as that guy I have to admit that I need a seatbelt extension.

In the end, paying for an extra seat doesn't work a lot ot the time because on many airlines the passenger is forced to give up the extra seat or can't get two assigned together. This means the extra seat is another fee with no benefit to the the obese passenger or anyone else.

Some airlines won't let a passenger book two adjoining seats:

http://consumerist.com/2009/05/delta...ing-seats.html

BTW, if I pay for an extra seat and the stewardess gives it away, the first call I make is to my credit card company. If they only deliver one seat, I only pay for one seat.

Just travel with a very skinny person. ;)

I don't understand why they don't just force a ticket purchase in first class instead. Those seats are far larger.

I'm not one of life's flyers, so forgive me if this is a dumb question: what happens when someone who has particular needs due to disablement (wheelchair and restricted mobility, fo example) books a flight?

They are lifted into the airplane seat, and their (airport-issued) wheelchair is folded up and stored at the front of the aisle. Their own personal non-folding wheelchair gets checked and stored underneath the plane. At some point the airlines always have the "you're too unhealthy to fly" card they can play at their discretion. But so far they haven't been allowed to classify fat people as unhealthy.

I thought all wheelchairs fold??

Not the fancy motorized ones. They're not as common, and the people who use them also tend to have lifts in their vehicles and everything--but I figured Dana was asking about a more severely disabled person.

If you're so disabled you need an assistant to fly with you, their seat is not free. If your so big you need two seats, you should have to pay for it. And you should be able to use it. It's ridiculous that airlines should feel they can take the extra seat away or not put the large traveller's two seats together.

I was just thinking that since there is a stupid tax, there ought to be a fat tax. fair's fair.

You're wrong there should be a fair tax

I'm an extremely ambulatory big fat guy, and I'm here to tell you that I am just about as big as you can be and still fit in a regular coach seat.

at 6'2" ish and 290.....it would suck if I had to fly on a regular. I would probably get motivated to lose some fucking weight.

In the land of the airplanes, the short people are king.

No. Fat people are still one (1) person. They purchase a ticket for one (1) person. Personally, I'd like to see a class action lawsuit suing the shit out of every single airline on the planet that condone this type of greedy bullshit.

They already have us squeezed in like sardines. I'm 6'4, 225 lbs. I always fly coach, take an isle seat and sit with my legs in the isle. I'd like to see them try to make me buy two tickets because I'm too tall. There'd be a lawsuit slapped on their ass faster than they could say "we'll settle out of court."

No, no, no, no and no. Fat people are still one (1) person.
.......................................................

Just like charging $20.00 a bag. That just reeks of greed. The only smart one out there that I know of is Southwest Airlines.

Only the tall and fat people are squeezed in like sardines. Short skinny people have plenty of room. It's simple geometry.

Maybe we should just send children on business trips.

They are more than capable of ordering planes from Boeing with fewer and larger seats installed. But then, the tickets would cost more, and we'd all just be subsidizing the people who would have needed two seats. Buy one (1) first-class ticket if you're that big.

They run their business well, to be sure. But you'd better believe their coach seats are just as small as the rest.

Braggart. ;)

First class is expensive. I flew my mother first class about three years ago to visit her grand daughter. I paid just over $900 for first class in a 3-hour flight. It would've cost $300 for coach. And they still only gave her a bag of peanuts and a soda - just like coach. All she got was a bigger seat for $600 more bucks.

poofterist.

Why can't they build planes with a couple of rows of "husky" seats -4 seats in place of 5, 4 rows instead of 5 -16 seats instead of 25, travellers pay$480 instead of $300, travellers who can't fit in a regular seat must pay for one of these.

Same as clothes. You need bigger clothes, it uses more cloth, costs more money. No amount of fairness is going to squeeze Big Brenda into a size 2.

Makes sense to have that option. It seems silly to have only first class as the option available to bigger people. Apart from anything else, the number of people who would use/need that option is growing (no pun intended) so the airlines are missing a trick: pissing off a significant proportion of their prospective customer base.

Don't they already do that, and call it first class, and charge 5 times the coach rate?

Like glatt said, they do that and they call it first class. The problem is your 4-to-5 switch doesn't really do much: an airline seat is maybe 18 inches across? So in a more spacious row of 4 seats, each seat is only getting an extra 4 inches. That's not gonna help Tubby McLardass a whole bunch. Same with the extra space in the front, it's only going to be a few inches.

First class generally has 3 rows 4 seats across, where in coach they could have fit 5 rows 6 across. So you've gone from 30 seats to 12, and not surprisingly, they charge somewhere between 2 and 3 times the price depending on the demand in that flight for the first class seats. Seems perfectly fair to me.

I don't have plenty of room, I feel totally squeezed in, I don't know how people any larger can stand it.
If it weren't so awful to fly, I might do it more often.

You could always fly JetBlue. Of course, like everything better, it's also more expensive.

I'm getting Deja Vu reading this . . . Did we already do this somewhere?

For the record - I agree that if you are taking up space equal to 2 seats (for whatever reason) then you should pay for both. If you stick out like the guy in the pic from the original post - You shouldn't be there at all. Take a barge or something. Thats past inconvenience, thats outright dangerous.

That's kinda my point. Short small people have absolutely no idea how good they have it.

I agree. The last time I flew the seat rows were so close together that I could not lean over enough to reach for my purse on the floor. I had to hook it with my foot and bring it up to my hand. Im 5ft and 110 pounds.

People are essentially living cargo. It costs X to fly a plane from here to there. The costs of that flight have to be divided by the amount (volume, not quantity ) of cargo the plane can carry form here to there.

If cargo TYPE A takes up 4 units of space and cargo TYPE B takes up 8 units of space, then you can only carry half as much TYPE B cargo.

That being said, if you can manage to fit 8 units of cargo into a 4 unit space, then you should only have to pay for 4 units of space. But if you really take up 8 units of space, then you should pay for it.

i got yer unit right here

Tail Post
 

The primary characteristic differentiating the gentleman in the picture is that he is 2 heads TALLER than an average person. Should he pay more for being taller? If he were carrying an equivalent amount of weight on a smaller/shorter frame, would there even be a problem? This man's shoulders would not fit across the back of that seat if he were literally a skeleton. He's a giant.

he is clearly too tall for his hair, even.

He's 1 head taller - and who knows how much of that is just extra thick ass.

I think he's sitting on the arm rest. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the armrest by the aisle is usually fixed in place and won't fold up.

i said I LOLLED.

but unaffordable to many. I was trying for a compromise, a little more space for not quite so much more money.

An extra 4 inches in both directions would be a huge help for a lot of people who are not ginormous, but maybe 6'2" and built to match. It's nearly a 25% increase each way, ffs -nearly 50% increase in square inches. You wouldn't say no to that if it was a pay rise

I think your spell check misidentified eunuch as unit.

How very communist of you.

Reds under the beds!

I too was assuming he's sitting on the armrest and maybe something underneath him in the seat to get the rest of the ass to armrest level. Those outer armrests don't move.

so the next guy will be wondering why his left arm smells like ass. that's nice. good job fatty.

no, he won't, he's flying delta. ass smell is expected. might even be in the terms and conditions.

Air New Zealand is at least trying. They just announced a couple new seat configurations. Couples fling coach can pay 25% more each to buy an unoccupied seat between them, and the row of seats fold into a bed. A bed for short people, but still, a bed.

The first picture shows models who appear to be a little short, and the second picture shows more normal sized people with their legs all folded up to fit in the bed.

I bet that is really nice if you have kids.

I think fat people would still have a problem with those seats...

Personally I think if you take up more than one seat you should pay for more than one seat. Have you ever had to sit next to a really fat person on a plane? Trust me, it sux.

If you obstruct the comfort of other passengers by invading their space with your body you should get and be charged for 2 seats, not stuffed into one seat overflowing into your neighbor.

At the same time though, I agree that it's bullshit that some of the airlines think they can take those second, already-paid-for seats and give them to another passenger if the flight is full. If you bought the seat, you bought the seat, I don't care whether you're filling it with a child, a surfboard, or a pile of gut lard.

The Airlines have become quite a bit more militant over the years.