Another Airline PR Disaster
After the fun and games of United Airlines and , it seems that SouthWest Airlines decided that the fat guy in the seat should be ejected from the plane on the grounds he was a safety hazard.
Now Kevin Smith may be slightly on the large side, but he is also a film director with a very large following on Twitter as SouthWest has found out to its cost.
Apparently he fitted fine into the next plane.
Oops.
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
WTF?
I mean, really. He isn't even that big a guy. Was it a case of the flight being overbooked, someone was going to get booted, and they figured that would be an easy pretext for choosing whom?
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Actually Kevin Smith has picked up a lot of weight in the last two years. When I saw him last he had gotten a lot larger. Something about smoking too much pot and eating too much. (His own words, said at the Count Basie in Red Bank.)
I am fat myself. But having been squashed by a seat overflowing fellow passenger more than once, their armrest rule is legit. Flying stinks enough as it is, being squashed in any further is too much.Smith had fallen victim to Southwest's booking guidelines for a "customer of size" which say that passengers who are unable to lower both armrests when seated should book another seat because of complaints it has received from customers whose comfort has been ruined by the "encroachment of a large seatmate".
So I think it comes down to the armrest rule. If he could not lower both, Southwest was right to enforce its policy equally, even against a famous person. If he could lower the armrests, SouthWest's crew were assholes.
It doesn't say, but props to Mr. Smith for apparently not flying first class. I know he got larger, but he is not too large for first class, just steerage with the rest of us slobs.
I'm a big fatso and I can lower both arm rests when I'm on a plane. If he can't then he must be enormous! I'm curious how often this has happened to a non-famous person.
According to this article at CNN: (Bolding mine)
This is not Southwest's fault. If you know you need two seats, and try to fit into one, that makes you a jackass.Smith, 39, originally purchased two tickets "as he's been known to do when traveling Southwest," the airline noted, but when he decided to fly standby on an earlier flight, only one seat remained. Although he had been seated, he was asked to leave.
Kevin Smith issues seat challenge for 'Daily Show'
Kevin Smith's not done with Southwest Airlines yet. Twenty-hour hours following an incident with the airline involving his weight, the popular director is still stirring up a storm on Twitter by mocking the airline's "large customer" policy, demanding a more thorough apology after getting pulled off a flight, and challenging them to bring one of their seats onto "The Daily Show" so he can prove to the world that he fits into a seat just fine.
Well Southwest might as well accept the challenge and be prepared to make a very public apology when Kevin wins it. They don't have too many ways to look good at this point and I doubt Kevin would issue the challenge if he was not sure he would win.
So the public Mea Culpa with the promise to train their crews to be more human is the best idea. Probably a $10,000 donation to the Haiti relief fund or NORML would help.
It will be a great Daily Show if nothing else.
Yeah, he doesn't really strike me as the type to open himself up to having a potentially humiliating bluff called.
Apparently he typically buys two seats because he can afford them and because he likes the have the buffer room between himself and the next passenger (and who doesn't, no matter how skinny?) not because he is a big fatty fatso. Whether he normally buys two seats or not isn't the issue - it's whether he really is a "safety risk" like Southwest said he was.Originally posted by Queen of Hearts
I don't know about Kevin Smith in particular, although in recent photos he seems quite substantial. But if he can fit into a standard seat with the armrests down and seatbelt buckled, Southwest should have let him fly and they were stupid for overlooking the negative PR ramifications of denying a seat to someone who can fit into it.
That said, I have little sympathy for anyone who DOESN'T fit into a standard airline seat but thinks the airline owes them two seats at no extra charge. This is not because I think fat people are automatically lazy/stupid/deserve to be treated badly. Not at all; there are plenty of skinny people who are far worse human beings than a lot of fat people, and I would never think less of someone based on weight alone.
But guess what - we ALL have conditions that inconvenience us or are in some way costly. Some of these situations may be within our control; others may not be. However, the sad fact of the matter is that we don't get a free ride in life; all sorts of things are going to cost us.
If I'm in a car accident on the way to a job interview and as a result, someone else gets the job even though I would have been a great employee, I don't get to demand that the company give me a job. If I audition for a part in a movie and I'm a great actor but I'm 5'5 and the part calls for someone 6'3, I don't get to complain when someone else gets the role. If I have 5 kids and can't afford as nice a vacation as my childless neighbor takes, the travel agent doesn't owe me a nice trip.
Likewise - if my size means that I do not fit into one seat, the airline doesn't owe me a second one for free. Suck it up, folks. We ALL have to spend money on things other people don't have to pay for, just because of who we are and what our life is like. At least you theoretically have the option of losing weight; on the other hand, I can't do a damn thing about the fact that every pair of eyeglass lenses I buy costs about 5 times the average because I was born with off-the-charts myopia. Despite this, I've never asked the optometrist to sell me lenses at the same price his less optically challenged customers pay.
Famous person gets treated like one of us plebs -- throws hysterical shitfit.
Waaah. Waaaaah.
Well to be fair, he seems to be taking this with his normal humor. It not as if he suddenly starting blogging and tweating. Smith is a legit geek that happens to be famous. He spends a lot of time on line and is known for posting all over the web. He got treated like shit apparently, felt bad and tweated about it and what not. He did not exactly take out ads or sue Southwest. He just did his normal thing and this one went viral.
By the sounds of it, he passes the Southwestern Airlines test for fitting into a seat. Armrests down, buckle done up.
He normally buys two seats because he enjoys the space, not because he needs it. However, on this occasion he got bumped and the reason they gave him was because he was a safety risk due to size.
In this case, SW really needs some training for their staff in how to handle the customers.
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, it certainly sounds as though Southwest could stand to work on addressing the individual needs of their passengers with greater finesse.
On the other hand, I feel the need to endorse any policy which prevents Kevin Smith from sharing my flight.
Well, it could be worse. It could be Michael Moore.
Actually, all other things being equal, Moore would probably be the more tolerable seatmate; I'm sure he would probably have a lot to say, but as long as the conversation didn't linger too long on the topic of gun control, I'd probably be okay.
Moore seems to be concerned mostly with trivial matters such as corporate influence on politics and society, but he doesn't strike me as the sort who might harbor egregiously wrong opinions on really important controversial topics like Batman. Kevin Smith on the other hand...
Now that I think about it, Moore and Smith on a plane together would be an interesting situation to observe, or preferably to hear about afterward.
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