This BS Story Is Too Fat To Fly

Bravo, Southwest. Congratulations for once again flashing your Teflon-like ability to deflect criticism of your insensitive policies.

By now, most of you have heard about Kevin Smith’s encounter with Southwest’s decades-old “Customer of Size” policy, which requires oversized people to pay for a second ticket.

The blogosphere has been humming about this all week, with Smith or against. Take Kate Harding’s expletive-punctuated piece on Salon, or the rising number of critics who think that flying Southwest in the first place might be proof that the director is sputtering out.

All this media chatter, and the comments by readers afterward, seem irretrievably drawn to the topic of Smith’s size. Even Smith himself is obsessed with calling out the airline to clear his name and prove he can fit in one Southwest seat. Once the issue of size in America becomes the focus, the debate over airline quality gets reduced to a battle between the fatties and the sticks.

Of course, fighting over a “fat tax” confuses the actual issue, which is airline quality in America. And Southwest is working overtime, on purpose, to create this duplicity.

Look at the airline’s original “apology” to Smith after the incident. It combined just the right doses of passive aggressiveness (“It is not our customary method of Customer Relations to be so public in how we work through these situations”), celebrity special treatment (“As soon as we saw the first Tweet from Mr. Smith, we contacted him personally to apologize,” so if you schmoes don’t have 1.5 million Twitter followers don’t expect us to do sh**) and implications that Smith really was too big for his britches, as evidenced by the airline’s conclusion:

The spirit of this policy is based solely on Customer comfort and Safety. As a Company committed to serving our Customers in Safety and comfort, we feel the definitive boundary between seats is the armrest. If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.

Smith has screamed in his own blog posts that he fit in one seat just fine, and that a few Southwest PR zombies agreed with him until they saw the hypocrisy peaking on the horizon.

Southwest’s size policy is problematic indeed. Sure, getting called out by a flight attendant in front of 150 passengers is demeaning enough, but let’s ignore hurt feelings for a minute. The problem is the capriciousness of its enforcement, the idea that you can move from the ticket counter to the check-in kiosk, to the gate, to the plane, to your seat, and at every step of the way someone can derail your travel plans because they think you’re too big for the seat.

It’s all eyeballs and judgment calls, because Southwest won’t commit to a concrete definition of who’s too fat to fly – and they can’t, because if they ever tried to establish “fattie rules” they’d be hauled into court in half a heartbeat.

What stops an airline employee from taking frustrations out on an irritating passenger by throwing him off or making him pay double? What if the employee is just having a bad day? Because there are no rules, the potential for misuse and abuse of this policy is enormous.

And now we’ve come to the big picture: Since when did the joke about “cattle class” stop being funny and become official strategy? Economy travellers today often fly for hours with no food and minimal beverage service, sometimes without functional entertainment, strapped to a seat that even average-sized adults have some trouble fitting in properly.

I recently took a six-hour transcontinental flight where the attendants just refused to clean the bathrooms, claiming it wasn’t their responsibility. By the time the plane landed, the toilets were reeking. On my next flight, a 12-hour international jaunt, a couple seated nearby were forced to hold their two-month-old infant for the whole flight because no one remembered to load the 747 — which had been sitting at the gate for hours — with bassinets.

Cattle class? Ha ha.

The size of the seat is entirely at the airline’s discretion. When an airplane builder, say Boeing, designs an aircraft, it offers buyers a choice of standard seat arrangements. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of airlines choose the most cramped seating to squeeze as many dimes out of each flight as possible. In fact, with Boeing’s new 787 “Dreamliner,” the company reportedly had to go back to the drawing board because the seats as originally designed weren’t narrow enough for airlines’ tastes.

The most common seat width on US airlines is 17 inches, about 2-4 inches smaller than studies suggest for adequate flying comfort. In business class, which for most US carriers resembles what coach service was a few decades ago, seats are usually 19-22 inches wide. What a coincidence!

If every coach seat were 19 inches wide, I am sure that 90% of customer comfort complaints would disappear overnight. So if the airlines determine every detail of the passenger experience, including the size of the seats, and choose to eliminate comfort for profit, how can they get a pass when coach class is so sh**ty? How is Southwest not the root cause of the problem when its employees declare someone too fat to fly, whether or not he wasn’t?

And one other thing about the seats never seems to get covered when people complain about them: they were first designed back when only one class of traveller mattered, i.e. men. Women are built differently than men — no complaints about that, btw — which creates a whole different set of problems which (of course) could also be alleviated by a wider seat.

I went to college with a woman who is nowhere near fat — in fact, she works as a model and competed in national beauty pageants a few years back — who has trouble fitting into a standard airline seat. First off, she’s about six feet tall, which brings her knees close to the seat in front. Second, she’s got curves, which means her hips give her very little room between the armrests. Clearly even mildly overweight women could run into trouble with a policy like Southwest’s.

Of course, it’s all a feat of legerdemain, keeping people at bay until they leave the airplane and politely ignoring their complaints afterwards. For instance, airlines don’t store tray tables in the armrest for safety reasons; there are dozens of ways to give customers in the front row counter space without making the seat narrower. (Lo and behold, Virgin America puts the personal TV and the tray in the bulkhead.) It’s done to discourage larger passengers from being seated there, so that normal-sized customers don’t cry foul. It’s the same concept as hanging a curtain between coach and first class; people who don’t see how much better other passengers are being treated are much less likely to complain themselves.

The psychological games that airlines play to convince the hearts and minds of the travelling public that it’s YOU who are the problem prove they’re working every time a Southwest size story devolves into an anti-fattie polemic. All of this has generated mounds of publicity for the airline for the price of one disgruntled celebrity’s ticket.

So the next time you get screwed by an airline’s boorish policy, particularly Southwest’s size discrimination, it is your right and your responsibility to scream bloody murder — and, if necessary, take your business somewhere else. The only way airlines will change is if we, the little guys who make up 99.99999999% of their revenue, force them to take their heads out of the clouds. Because this BS is just too fat to fly forever.

Introducing The Other Man: What’s this, a man’s man and a feminist? Labels are so 1968. When my friends convince me — usually with extreme prejudice — to commit my thoughts to paper, I don’t hold back for anyone. I live and let live, but I’m not some hippie wimp. Be careful what you do on my watch, and be careful what you ask for because you may get it with both barrels. I’m The Other Man — because sometimes you need a long, hard dose of the truth.