WTF News: Dealing with Overweight Airline PassengersThat's the actual title the headline writer on the Seattle Times website gave to the article, which is an advice column on the topic of airline passengers whose fat bodies occupy portions of other passengers' seats.
I belabor this point so that I might object to this manner of framing the issue. The person who wrote in to the columnist, and the columnist, and most of the American public, place the blame for the current state of affairs squarely on fat people.
Fat people are not to blame for spilling over their armrests. The airline industry is to blame. When a product does not suit a customer, that is a limitation of the product--not a flaw in the customer. Airlines have shrunk their seats to boost corporate profitability, by fitting more seats onto the same airplanes. Airlines have done so even as the nation's citizens are becoming fatter. The result is a product that simply does not fit a substantial percentage of the population. Fat people are forced to choose between not flying, buying two tickets per person (or buying a first-class ticket), or enduring and potentially imposing various hardships.
Faced with this dilemma the public offers no sympathy, only scorn and malice. Even many fat people cast aspersions.
Because of the present dynamics, fat people have come to subsidize the airline industry, both directly and indirectly. All else being equal, airfare in coach class is cheaper than it would otherwise be because of these cramped seats. When you pay less money to buy passage, you sacrifice some of your personal space. For many passengers the sacrifice is trivial, or annoying but still acceptable, because of the value of the fare. But passengers who do not fit into the shrunken seats sacrifice much more deeply because they need more space and have less or even none to spare. Their suffering subsidizes the cheaper prices we all pay to fly. And the ones who actually do buy a first-class ticket or two coach ones to accommodate their broad dimensions...they directly subsidize these price savings.
So the next time you want to blame a fat person for the mortal sin of physically touching you with their fat, blame yourself for being a cheapskate, or blame the industry for accommodating your cheapness to the point of degrading much of the national population.
Or, you know, be a decent person, accept your grisly fate, dismiss your enmity, and appreciate the fact that you live in an age when you can fly above the clouds.
Meanwhile, the government needs to step in. Air travel is the only practical form of transportation for many different personal and professional scenarios. Access to air travel therefore ought to be either a high-ranking civil privilege or a low-ranking civil liberty. Therefore, the airlines must not be allowed to systematize discrimination against fat people in the present manner. Instead, government regulators must mandate that airlines provide a certain number of ampler seating accommodations, to account for larger passengers. These seats must be sold at or close to coach prices, and made available first to people who need them, and only afterwards to passengers seeking more comfort. General coach airfares should be slightly raised to account for the loss of several seats per flight.
