Photo: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor (Getty)
As if patting you down and grabbing your genitals wasn’t humiliating enough.
David Haleck is probably not going to fly with Hawaiian Airlines because he says he was humiliated recently after the airline didn’t allow him on board a flight from Pago Pago to Honolulu until he let them weigh him. Haleck is one of two American Samoan businessmen who filed a complaint with the US Transportation Department.
And if you’re wondering just why the hell the airline would ask people to weigh themselves it’s because Hawaiian Airlines has had to start weighing some passengers because Samoa has a high rate of obesity — 74.6% amongst adults, to be exact. It is being reported that passengers can no longer pre-select a seat of their choice and that they are weighed and then distributed to balance out the plane. Distributed? Like cattle. I see.
Apparently the airline confirmed the theory, adding that expanding waistlines sometimes requires them to redistribute weight in its Boeing 767 cabins to meet the manufacturer’s guidelines.
But even with all that, Haleck believes that all this is discriminatory because it only applies to those flying to or from American Samoa. “Hawaiian is saying that it is a safety issue. So have we been flying unsafe for all these years?” Haleck asks.
A Hawaiian Airlines spokeswoman informed everyone that the practice was carried out as part of a six-month survey, which was since ended: “”The decision to assign seats at the airport was made because that is the most efficient way to manage weight distribution. This allows us to make sure that families with children are seated together, for example, and it minimizes the confusion created by changing pre-selected seats.”
Well, so while sometimes we have to deal with annoying passengers and doppelgängers on planes, we may now have to deal with being weighed.
h/t Distractify
