Flying while fat

Plus-sized passengers on flights operated by Europe's Air France-KLM may find themselves reaching deeper into their wallets next month. KLM has announced that overweight passengers will have to purchase a second seat, albeit at a 25 percent discount, if they cannot fit into a single seat on fully booked flights. However, if there is room on the flight, the cost of the second seat will be refunded.

Safety in mind

The airline has defended its policy as a safety measure, meant to ensure that overweight passengers can buckle their safety belts. However, KLM does not currently have any hard and fast rules in place for how large a passenger may be before being required to purchase a second seat.

In the United States, it is not uncommon for airlines to ask overweight passengers to purchase two seats. MeMe Roth, an American nutrition expert known for her anti-obesity activism, defended the practice.

"The airline industry is really a weight and freight business model," Roth told Deutsche Welle. "They need to push as many units as they can. If they start selling two for one, we all have to make up for that in revenue. She added that those who make "the hard choice of staying healthy" have to subsidize those who don't.

Germans too fat

In Germany, Europe's fattest country according to a study by the International Association for the Study of Obesity, about two thirds of the population are either overweight or obese. Here, the idea of asking some passengers to buy two seats is drawing criticism.

Gisela Enders, a member of the German fat acceptance association "Dicke Verein", told Deutsche Welle, "A person in a wheelchair would never be asked to pay a double price, even though it does make for more work."

Shrinking seat size

Still, with airlines struggling to stay solvent in the face of increasing fuel costs, the rush to cut costs in the aviation industry isn't likely to go away soon. In November the German airline Lufthansa announced it would decrease the size of the its airplane seats so that more passengers could fit in a single aircraft. Lufthansa spokesman Jan Baerwalde told Deutsche Welle that Lufthansa had no plans to implement a similar policy on obese passengers.

"In our experience, we don't need a fixed regulation on that because the cases are so few that we can deal with them individually, " said Baerwalde.

Author: Sarah Harman

Editor: Susan Houlton