Danger — wide load!
Federal aviation authorities investigated an Internet photo showing a massively fat flier’s flab oozing hazardously into the aisle of an American Airlines plane — but said yesterday that before the flight took off, attendants decided to give the man two extra seats, apparently in line with safety rules.
Worried that the severely obese passenger would block the plane’s aisle in an emergency, American cleared out the normal-sized guy in the adjacent seat by offering him a ticket on a later flight.
Then, the American crew assigned the fat man two more seats. “The passenger in this case had a whole row to himself,” said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown.
The fat flier was buckled in the middle seat with a seat belt and one seat-belt extender — to have given him two extenders would have violated safety rules.
The rules allowed the man to sit with the arms of his row’s middle seat raised up, Brown said.
“There were no FAA rules violated,” Brown said.
The flight took off from San Francisco. Brown couldn’t confirm its final destination or flight date — the picture surfaced a few weeks ago on the airline Web site Flightglobal.com.
American Airlines officials were mum about the incident yesterday, and it was unclear whether the fat man had to pay for the two extra seats.
Airline rules vary widely on how to handle plus-sized passengers who can’t fit into cramped seats. JetBlue leaves to its crews how to deal with fat passengers; Delta says it deals with them on a case-by-case basis. American has said it has no hard-and-fast fat-flier rules.
Whether it’s a safety issue is cause for debate.
Overweight and obese passengers have not factored in any commercial plane crashes, a search of the National Transportation Safety Board database shows. And one airline source noted that children and slow-moving elderly passengers could hamper evacuations as much as an obese person.
In the last decade, several pilots and airline crews have anonymously reported to the FAA their concerns with fat passengers, and in 2003 a captain was replaced by his airline after he refused to take off with a 600-pound paraplegic passenger he feared couldn’t be safely evacuated from the plane.
Two fat people in an airline’s emergency-exit row rendered the exit “useless,” reported a pilot in another anonymous FAA report that also doesn’t name the airline.
“One of the ladies was so large that she physically wouldn’t be able to exit the aircraft through the emergency exit,” wrote the pilot, who was a passenger on the 2004 flight.
“I believe this to be a safety compromise.”
Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett and Perry Chiaramonte