1. The airline's motives have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with race
2. The airline clearly explained its motives
It's almost as if people actually don't understand what discrimination means.
You cannot talk about discrimination without also talking about disparate impact[0]: Policies which, while not being of discriminatory origins, end up disproportionately hitting a certain class of people.
This happened a lot in housing policy. decades of racist housing and bank policymeans that blacks end up being "stuck" in low-income housing, even when black families in fact make a lot of money[1].
So now if you make any policy based around the land value of housing in many urban areas, this policy ends up disproportionately affecting blacks. Similarly, because of this, ghettos are formed, so any policy based on geography (school funding is a big one) also ends up disproportionately affecting blacks.
You might think it's unfair to claim an action is discriminatory when the motives are not so. But the alternative is to not acknowledge who these policies actually affect. If the effects of an action are discriminatory, does it matter whether the motives were such? At least in the context of removing discrimination?
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
[1]: "on average, whites earning only $30,000 live in better neighborhoods than blacks earning $100,000" https://jdodgeblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/on-coates-and-ne...
After all, the point of the CRA is to remove discriminatory situations. Much like a firefighter trying to stop a fire, whether intent is there is beside the point. The objective is to fix the problem.
Though I don't really know whether what's mentioned in the article is really a case warranting action. The harm applied here seems pretty minor (no assigned seating).
Car insurance companies should only charge one rate, because otherwise they're discriminating against teenagers and men. Health insurance companies should only charge one rate, otherwise they are discriminating against smokers. Life insurance companies should charge one rate, otherwise they discriminate against men. Annuities should all have the same payouts, otherwise they discriminate against women for the mere fact that they live longer on average.
Really, I understand your sentiment, but government mandate is not the solution.
Also, health insurance companies can discriminate against smokers, they're not a protected class for a reason.
I think insurance is a bit tricky because it's a mess of adverse selection and other effects that make it very different from "classic" free-market stuff.
I would have guessed the probable imbalance in any case would be very low compared to the total weight of the passengers + cargo, so not a big deal. But I suppose the airline tested whether their solution worked?
Also, cargo is lighter than the human payload. Most people aren't lugging around their body weight in luggage.
Weight <can> have something to do with race, just like IQ tests can have something to do with race, in the lens that they are more likely to affect one racial population than another, and the hiring outcomes they produce may sustain or encourage a disproportionate racial distribution.
So police stations have engaged in an affirmative argument that the use of IQ tests in employment candidacy is a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ).
If only my anorexic friend had known sooner that she just needed to work on her weight, she could have avoided things like nickel-and-diming airlines. (not only so I think the distribution claim is bogus, but it's a precursor to billing by passenger weight)
In general aviation just because the seat is there doesn't mean you can take off with someone in it. As a rule of thumb, "one seat" is a 150 pound person, no luggage, and sometimes that's counting some of your fuel there too. A 2-seat aircraft like the Cessna 152 doesn't take off with full tanks with 2 average adult males onboard even without luggage (360 pounds full-fuel payload), and it's a struggle to get off the ground with 2 heavier adults even with reduced fuel.
The C172 is a four-seater aircraft, 577 pounds full-fuel payload (note: less than 150 lbs per seat!). So with full fuel tanks you will get one pilot, one passenger, and either some luggage/cargo or a child passenger. Maybe a second adult passenger and no luggage if nobody is too heavy (above 175 lbs average). And an over-water flight in the Pacific is not the trip to take with a reduced fuel load. So you can see how the numbers work out here: the pilot plus one obese adult might literally be the entire payload for the flight.
(Note: a 2003 study from the New Zealand Ministry of Health set their "average" male passenger weight at 187 lbs without carryon, or 207 lbs with carryon, and the average female passenger weight at 159 lbs without carryon or 169 pounds with. Further, they noted that average passenger weight was increasing at about 2 kg/6.6 lbs per decade.)
source: https://www.caa.govt.nz/pubdocs/2003_pax_weight_survey.pdf
> Yes: because Samoa Air's fleet aircraft are all Cessna 172s. You are essentially paying for a personal charter flight in a small aircraft, so there are no "averages" there. A single obese passenger can directly increase a flight's payload weight by +100% or more. Not the case with an airliner, where you are averaging across 75-600 people.
> In general aviation just because the seat is there doesn't mean you can take off with someone in it. As a rule of thumb, "one seat" is a 68.03 kg person, no luggage, and sometimes that's counting some of your fuel there too. A 2-seat aircraft like the Cessna 152 doesn't take off with full tanks with 2 average adult males onboard even without luggage (163.29 kg full-fuel payload), and it's a struggle to get off the ground with 2 heavier adults even with reduced fuel.
> The C172 is a four-seater aircraft, 261.7 kg full-fuel payload (note: less than 68.03 kg per seat!). So with full fuel tanks you will get one pilot, one passenger, and either some luggage/cargo or a child passenger. Maybe a second adult passenger and no luggage if nobody is too heavy (above 79.37 kg average). And an over-water flight in the Pacific is not the trip to take with a reduced fuel load. So you can see how the numbers work out here: the pilot plus one obese adult might literally be the entire payload for the flight.
> (Note: a 2003 study from the New Zealand Ministry of Health set their "average" male passenger weight at 84.82 kg without carryon, or 93.89 kg with carryon, and the average female passenger weight at 72.12 kg without carryon or 76.65 kg with. Further, they noted that average passenger weight was increasing at about 2 kg/6.6 lbs per decade.)
> source: https://www.caa.govt.nz/pubdocs/2003_pax_weight_survey.pdf
But for a small flight with 6 passengers (which is the case most important to get right) it's probably going to be a manual affair.
That said - people might have all kinds of things they feel are embarrassing, such as removing their shoes which might be required in security. While I don't agree with TSA routines much - I still don't think we should care what people feel is embarrassing. Get over the embarrassment, fix your weight or avoid flying are 3 very real options.
Anecdote: I flew a Cessna 6 seater in Venezuela and couldn't sit next to my wife, instead had to sit next to a 50kg sack of frozen chicken (the implication being that me and the chicken were the lightest, and my wife was heavier than the chicken sack by enough). I laughed and laughed. Pro tip: don't laugh.
They could scan your ticket into the body scanner to identify/validate your ticket, and then it spits the weight back into the airline's computers for balance calculation.