How fat is too fat to fly?

Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

“I fly coast to coast several times a year, and I cannot tell you how many times I have been pinned in by a morbidly obese human,” said Mark Sweeting, a frequent flier from Portland, Ore., who says he used to request an exit row seat for the extra legroom, but that he now avoids that row having noticed that large passengers often request those seats for the same reason. “I don’t know what the correct solution is,” he said, “But it is a real problem.”

Some airlines have responded by tweaking their policies to encourage large passengers to buy more space. On Feb. 1 Air France, which for the last five years has offered “passengers with a high body mass” the option of buying a second seat in economy at a 25 percent discount, said it would reimburse the cost of the second seat if the plane wasn’t full. Last year, United set a formal policy to get large passengers to buy an upgrade or extra seat after it received 700 complaints in 2008 from customers whose seatmates did not fit into a single seat. Since then, said Robin Urbanski, a United spokeswoman, that number has dropped to about 100…

But fliers who have been encroached on by a large passenger say not addressing the issue is not fair, either. When I wrote about the photo of an obese airline passenger making its way around the Internet in December, 200 readers posted comments to the blog post at nytimes.com/intransit. Many said charging customers who take up two seats for both of them is reasonable. They recounted flights where an obese passenger infringed on their space. “While I understand it’s not easy for anyone involved, including the obese passenger, I once was unable to move for about three hours during a flight because I was literally sandwiched between the obese passenger next to me and the window,” posted Bridget Jesionowski, of Claremont, Calif. “I was uncomfortable and I know she was as well, as she kept apologizing to me.”