Plus-size travelers hit out at ‘discriminatory’ airline seat policies | Hacker News Reader

Plus-size travelers hit out at ‘discriminatory’ airline seat policies

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4 pointsTomte22 comments

>>> But it’s not as if someone is getting up in the morning and making a decision that they’re going to be a large person

This fallacy is a big problem with people claiming that various negative things in life are "not choices". The idea is that if you can't bring it about by "waking up one morning and deciding to be xxx" then it's not a choice.

This is plainly untrue. Many situations take a series of bad choices to bring about, and a corresponding series of good choices to fix. The fact that you can't simply decide get into a given situation instantly or decide to get out of it instantly doesn't mean that it's not a choice.

Indeed. A lot of people lately have been trying to erase the line between "things that were foreseeable consequences of your choices" and "things that you had no control over".

That and everyone has a right to decide what rights they have.

> Being a large-size person is not a choice, as many people mistakenly believe,” Lukacs tells CNN Travel. > But it’s not as if someone is getting up in the morning and making a decision that they’re going to be a large person.

More importantly, they're not waking up in the morning and making the decision that they're not going to be a large person.

I could be convinced otherwise if there were any medical evidence that it's possible to be obese on a sustained, healthy diet. I don't believe that evidence exists though.

I have seen highly educated people claim that the body has a "natural weight" that it will always adhere to in spite of exercise or eating habits. Why this natural weight seems to skew to a much bigger number on average specifically in the US has yet to be answered.

The last time my diminutive elderly mother flew to visit me, she had to sit next to a "plus size" woman who was so fat that the armrest between them wouldn't go down, and the woman spilled over into half of my mother's seat. My mom had to spend the 3-hour flight crushed against the opposite arm rest. She tried to get help from the flight attendant, but the plane was completely full so there was nowhere to move either of them.

If the solution is for "people of size" to be allowed to take two seats for the price of one, the cost per seat will go up for everyone; this is especially true if, according to the article, 38% of the world is obese and would presumably be able to take advantage of this situation.

Why should people who make good dietary choices have to subsidize ones who make poor dietary choices? If you take up two seats and weigh as much as (and so cause as much fuel burn as) two people, why shouldn't you have to pay for two tickets?

The article is less about that but more about the need for clear policies and consistent adherence to said policies regarding plus sized passengers.

One interesting development that I've found in recent years is the emergence of "fat chairs" in most medical waiting rooms. You've got your ordinary chairs for normal-sized people, and then, scattered around, are a few "fat chairs" which are nearly double-wide and presumably constructed so that they will not collapse under the extra weight. I kinda like these chairs myself, because there's space to set my bag next to me.

Now I am overweight, or perhaps obese, and perhaps yes, this is a choice or series of choices that I've made. Several years ago I had to come to terms with the fact that I was significantly overweight, and the condition had crept up on me so stealthily that I hardly realized the changes. Having identified it as a problem, I resolved to fix it, and I dieted 3 times. The first time I lost 30 pounds and then gained them back. The second and third times, I lost significant weight, and in fact I went all the way down to 143 pounds (I'm 5'10"). I exuberantly donated away a bunch of "fat clothes" and purchased all sorts of new wardrobe, like skinny jeans, size "S" tee shirts, and the like. Then, guess what, I gained it all back.

And ultimately, the diet I eat now is less of a choice and more of something I've been forced into. I went over it in a previous thread and I don't want to rehash that. But just suffice it to say that I really, really long for the diet I had when I weighed 143 pounds, and I wish I could eat fresh healthy food, but circumstances and my disabilities make that an impossibility. So I live at 250 pounds, for better or worse.

> I dieted 3 times. The first time I lost 30 pounds and then gained them back. The second and third times, I lost significant weight, and in fact I went all the way down to 143 pounds (I'm 5'10"). I exuberantly donated away a bunch of "fat clothes" and purchased all sorts of new wardrobe, like skinny jeans, size "S" tee shirts, and the like. Then, guess what, I gained it all back.

It sounds like you're saying you dieted to lose weight, then once you reached your target weight, you stopped dieting, and that's when it started to come back. Is that what you meant?

> And ultimately, the diet I eat now is less of a choice and more of something I've been forced into. I went over it in a previous thread and I don't want to rehash that. But just suffice it to say that I really, really long for the diet I had when I weighed 143 pounds, and I wish I could eat fresh healthy food, but circumstances and my disabilities make that an impossibility.

Can you link to that thread?

> Can you link to that thread?

No. Please don't try to dig this up. I told you I won't rehash it. Leave me alone.

We should pay by the pound.

This would be good in principle, but it could easily lead to practical problems like accidentally encouraging becoming underweight and things like anorexia. A better solution would be a flat rate for everyone who's not overweight, and then a per-pound surcharge for every pound that you're overweight by.

Nobody is underweight to pay less on a ticket. Please stop with the asinine comments and concern trolling.

I think the real story here the airlines would like us to ignore is that seats should be large enough to comfortably accommodate all body types.

Having the cheapest possible flights is not a civilization goal we should be aspiring to, especially in light of climate impacts.

> seats should be large enough to comfortably accommodate all body types.

No they shouldn't be. That would mean way fewer seats would fit on any given plane, which would send ticket prices through the roof for everyone. People who aren't fat shouldn't have to pay extra to accommodate those who are, when the options of buying two seats or a first-class seat are available.

> Having the cheapest possible flights is not a civilization goal we should be aspiring to, especially in light of climate impacts.

Climate impact is even more of a reason to not do what you want! We'd need more planes and bigger planes for the same amount of air travel, and so the carbon footprint of any given plane ticket would be much higher.

It's not just fat. It's large and tall people that struggle as well. Your knees hitting the back of the seat isn't a good way to travel either.

Since you don't have control over your height (and to a lesser extent, since you can't get more legroom by buying an additional seat), I don't have a problem with adding more space between rows to accommodate tall people. It's wider seats that I have an issue with.

Some people are large. Certainly there is variation. You still have to decide what width to set as reasonable.

How about 3 standard deviations above the mean of the non-overweight subset of the population?

>>> Having the cheapest possible flights is not a civilization goal we should be aspiring to

But everyone does have the same body type. They are just not all the same size. What you're saying is basically that people who are disadvantaged by their size should be given priority over those who are disadvantaged by being poor.

I would like to live in a world where people who are unusually big because of genetics or a genuine disability or medical condition or whatever can have the same experience as everyone else at the same price. And if that was truly the cause, we wouldn't be hearing about this. Airlines would just eat the cost and avoid the controversy. We're hearing about this because it's a massive epidemic in the West, brought on by lifestyle, and the airlines can't afford to assume that overweightness is an anomaly any longer.

I think this is a symptom. Sure they are very fat and you might think "I am not very fat, so this won't affect me." But it's very likely that you are at least overweight, since a good chunk of the wealthier population of the world is at least overweight (they get a lot to eat, after all). Now airline seats are shrinking, and people are getting fatter, and there will come a time soon when the odious minority of the morbidly obese turns into the minority of obese, into the large minority of overweight--and finally even those at a normal weight may start to become uncomfortable, because there are no standards set for seat size or basic human comforts on an airplane. The irony is that 50 or 60 years ago, there were significantly less obese people, yet they would be far better accommodated on an airplane.

(I will refrain from indulging in the fantasy-land scenario where we all take Semaglutide and become perfect little sticks so we can easily fit into increasingly shrinking airline seats. I do not want to live in a society where people are forced to take medicine just to function.)

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