Thai Airways to ban overweight flyers

Well, this is a story that may impact yours truly.

Say goodbye to stuffing your face with food court deliciousness before jumping on a Thai Airways flight, your boarding clearance may depend on it.

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New rules from Thai Airways may mean that overweight passengers will be stopped from boarding their flights.

The airline wants to implement new measures (excuse the pun) against overweight flyers who are unable to fit into their seatbelts.

The move comes as Thai Airways is planning to install ‘seatbelt airbags’ on business class cabins in the new Dreamliner jets.

According to the Bangkok Post, flyers with a bigger waistline than 142.2cm will not be able to fit into the seatbelts, and thus won’t be able to properly use the new airbags.

And, by not fitting into the seatbelts, the passengers will not be able to comply with safety standards.

It’s also bad news for parents, as the airbags will make flying young children difficult, who may be forced to sit in economy if they need to have kids on their laps.

As well as this, the new seatbelts cannot be lengthened due to the airbag mechanism, so it’s bad news all-round really.

Thai Airways has now officially imposed the waist-size limit and banned flyers from having kids on their laps.

In November of last year, Finnair confirmed its plans to weigh passengers prior to them boarding the plane, according to a report from The Sun.

The European airline revealed it wants to plonk as many as 150 of its passengers on every flight onto a set of scales – with their luggage – before getting onto the plane.

But, in a suspicious twist, Finnair said it wouldn’t be penalising anyone they deemed “overweight”.

Instead, they used the data collected from these weigh-ins to aid them in cutting operating costs.

Finnair claimed that by identifying more exact weight averages, the airline would be able to streamline their operating costs when it comes to the fuelling of its aircraft.

Per The Sun, until that point, Finnair relied on the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) figures to calculate how to balance the aircraft with fuel and overall weight.

Those measurements were made eight years ago, so Finnair hopes these new measures will be more reliable.

“We want to make sure we have the best possible data at our disposal also in this respect,” Sami Suokas, Manager of Customer Processes at Finnair, told the newspaper Helsinki Times.

“That’s why we’re collecting data from our own network.”

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Latest comments

Bruce says:
March 22, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Where is the comment i posted yesterday??
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