OT: overweight-man-kicked-off-southwest-flight

Kiralynx wrote:

BlackSpinner wrote:They are available but people refuse to buy them. As an employee of a major airline I sat in many of those seats because they were not sold while large people whined in the back about small seats. It is much cheaper to whine then it is to buy a seat that fits you.

And so... how do you FIND the larger seat? Airlines have so many different names for seats and so many different fare structures that it's well-nigh impossible for a passenger to figure out what the <bleep> they are looking for!

All the planes I've been on the arm rest between seats drops down. You could probably order two that are next to each other and it should accomodate a fairly formidable individual.

I'm 250 and have a fairly wide set of shoulders. I'm about as big as an airplane can realistically fit in one seat and it's not exactly comfortable either. I fit fine in the seat but even a normal sized man sits next to me and we're struggling for upper body room. I can't imagine being forced to sit next to someone "girth enhanced". IMHO, just because you're huge doesn't mean everyone has to put up with THAT to be respectful. Respect goes both ways.

Respect goes both ways.

Yes!

I have a fine friend and he is a gentleman in every way. The poor guy weights 400 lbs or more and is about 5'9". He flies regularly and always buys two adjacent seats.

He owns four NFL season ticket rights and since the armrest does not fold he sits on the aisle seat and about half of him hangs over into the aisle.

The seats are great and the guy is great. But it is painful to go with him to a game. Walking from the parking lot to his seats is a chore for him and watching him sitting on that little seat for three hours is painful to be with him.

He is a very bright guy, well educated, urbane and has a nice normal-sized wife and two daughters and two sons. He went on some kind of diet a time or two and lost 100 lbs but it came back quickly.

We have never discussed his weight. I wish there was something I could do for him.

Crazy Eddie wrote:All the planes I've been on the arm rest between seats drops down. You could probably order two that are next to each other and it should accomodate a fairly formidable individual.

And if you'd read my earlier posts, you'd have found out that my husband and I do pop the arm up between us, because my husband is quite tall and thin, (about 160 pounds) with wide shoulders.

I scoot over toward the side of the plain to allow HIM room for his shoulders. It's not comfy, having the edge of the seat cutting in, which is why I'd like the wider seat for me... and the greater pitch for his long legs.

I'm 250 and have a fairly wide set of shoulders. I'm about as big as an airplane can realistically fit in one seat and it's not exactly comfortable either. I fit fine in the seat but even a normal sized man sits next to me and we're struggling for upper body room. I can't imagine being forced to sit next to someone "girth enhanced". IMHO, just because you're huge doesn't mean everyone has to put up with THAT to be respectful. Respect goes both ways.

Yes, respect goes both ways... and again, if you'd read my earlier posts, I said that I would consider it rude to pop up my seat arm if it weren't my husband next to me, and encroach on someone else's space. I've scooted over on occasion to give a wide-shouldered other person extra room, even though I fit in the seat just fine. I don't happen to care for someone else's elbows jabbing my ribs, nor their shoulders clipping my ears.

What really ticks me off is the twits who jack their seat backs way back, and stick the top of their head under my nose. The problem is the pitch, the distance between rows of seats.

The people who REALLY annoy me is the skinny little guy who sat next to me last week, who thought he had basket balls between his legs and had to stick his elbows into my seat space so he could hold his attache case in his lap. No he wasn't tall, or had wide shoulders.

I have had to fly three hours wedged into my seat--one shoulder squished against the window--not able to even use an arm rest on the other side because the person next to me was too large for their seat. Sorry but overly large people should have to purchase two seats. It's not fair to fellow passengers. One poster tried to compare penalties for large people to being similar to discrimination by race, creed or religion. That's not a fair comparison. The color or religion of a person does not have any connection to how much room they occupy.

There isn't much difference between sitting next to a heavy person, a person w/ BO, a person who wants to chat when you don't, or a person who is so drunk that he smells up the plane and is loud as hell to boot. That happened to me recently. A nice woman in back of me gave me a tissue with a bit of expensive perfume on it. It was a six hour flight and I had a massive Migraine by the time we landed. I so wanted to change seats with a man sitting next to a crying baby... that wouldn't have bothered me nearly as much.

I actually watched as the drunk walked off the plane straight to a bar!