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JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER
Obese flyers should pay extra – heavier planes cost more…it’s about maths not ‘body shaming’
The truth is that most of us would support passenger weigh-ins
GOOD morning, and welcome to the check-in desk. Where are you flying to today?
Please put your luggage and YOURSELF on to the weighing scales.
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This could be the future of airline travel if a Finnish airline gets its way.
This week Finnair has been asking passengers to step on to the airport scales along with their cabin baggage before they boarded their flight.
Thinnair — as the airline has now been dubbed — insisted the weigh-ins are purely voluntary and that they are needed to more accurately estimate the average weight of passengers on their planes, and this is used to calculate fuel needs and keep flights safely in the air.
Which seems reasonable enough.
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Predictably, the news triggered an angry online debate, with one side raging that Finnair was “fat-shaming” passengers while the other side cheered them on.
Early death sentence
After all, if you’ve paid your hard-earned money for a long-haul flight then you want that entire seat to yourself without having another passenger’s big rolls of blubber splurging all over you, thanks very much.
But where would this all end?
Finnair’s weigh-ins may be voluntary today but could other greedy airlines soon decide to make them compulsory then start charging by the kilo?
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I wouldn’t put any money-making scheme past Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary.
Would thin passengers get to take large wheelie bags into the cabin, while their fatter fellow travellers are allowed only a small clutch purse and a toothbrush?
And what about tall people? Will they be penalised too? This is body-shaming on steroids!
I'm an 'obese' woman who enjoys travelling... cruel people constantly tell me to 'buy two seats' but there's a reason I never do it
Okay, calm down, everyone. This isn’t about fat shaming obese people.
It’s just maths: Heavier passengers mean planes weigh more, so they use more fuel and cost more to fly — and we ALL end up paying extra for that.
And the truth is that most of us would support passenger weigh-ins.
A poll by jetcost.co.uk in 2017 revealed that nearly nine out of ten Britons believed overweight passengers should pay more to fly — and eight out of ten of us said we wanted “plus-sized zones” to be introduced on flights.
Isn’t it time that we had a more honest conversation about obesity?
And it’s not like the check-in staff are going to announce your weight over the airport tannoy system, with a cheery, “Hey, everyone, look at this fatty over here weighing in at 20st!”
But, even if they did, would that necessarily be a bad thing?
Isn’t it time that we had a more honest conversation about obesity?
In my lifetime, we’ve gone from being a country where almost everyone was stick-thin to one where a majority of adults are overweight, with millions classed as obese.
Early death sentence
We’ve gone from criticising obesity to normalising and even celebrating it in just a few decades.
And that’s as unhealthy as the triple chocolate muffins that gluttons gobble down for breakfast.
Celebrity culture was rightly condemned for putting anorexic models on catwalks but today we have the Lizzo phenomenon, where the obese singer celebrates her rolls of lard as something to be proud of, rather than the early death sentence they actually are.
Politicians are no better.
Last year New York City passed a law banning discrimination based on weight, effectively making obesity a protected trait on a par with race and gender.
City officials claimed that obese New Yorkers were being unfairly discriminated against in everything from the size of cinema and theatre seats to weight limits for bike rental schemes and even restaurants with tables too close together for them to squeeze past.
They may want their cake and to eat it too, but why should we ALL end up paying a gateau tax?
This is madness!
Discriminating against someone because of their race or sex is wrong because they are immutable traits, but weight (for the vast majority of us) is a lifestyle choice.
If you want to be fat, that’s your choice.
It’s none of my business what you do with your body — except when you impose that on everyone else, including on the armrest of my aeroplane seat.
Why should the rest of the world have to adjust to accommodate obese people’s poor choices or have to pay more for the privilege?
Wouldn’t it be far kinder to stop pandering to the obesity cult and just be honest?
Obese people don’t live in a Pringles-fuelled vacuum.
Want their cake and eat it
Their choices affect the rest of us as well, and it’s not just sitting next to them on a plane or paying more for our flight because the plane has to use more fuel.
It’s the huge tax cost of their weight-induced illnesses (the risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes goes up along with your weight), and other NHS treatments like hip and knee operations, not to mention the ballooning cost of incapacity benefits for those who claim to be too fat to work.
They may want their cake and to eat it too, but why should we ALL end up paying a gateau tax?
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After all, excess baggage weighs the same whether it’s in your cabin wheelie bag or on your hips.
- Watch Julia on TalkTV 10am-1pm every Monday to Thursday.
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