Thai Airways bans obese passengers
Obese passengers and parents with young children have been banned from flying business class on Thai Airways’ new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners.
The ban was explained on Friday by the airline’s director of security and flight standard division, flight lieutenant Pratthana Pattanasirim, The Bangkok Post reported.
Thai Airways received two new 787-9 Dreamliners in September, which included brand new Zodiac Cirrus seats for their Royal Silk business class in a more spacious 1-2-1 configuration.
The seats convert to a fully flat bed and allow privacy and direct aisle access.
In accordance with the United States Federal Aviation Administration, the seats have new airbag systems and safety belts, which cannot accommodate passengers with a girth wider than 56 inches (142 centimetres).
This also rules out parents flying with young children seated on their laps, who will now be forced to fly cattle class on the Bangkok to Auckland and Taipei routes the new Dreamliners operate.
The new Boeing 787-9s were introduced to bring the most technologically advanced aircraft to its fleet for passenger comfort, and to open up opportunities to fly new non-stop routes to destinations such as North America.
This is in addition to its existing fleet of Boeing 787-8s (slightly smaller than the 787-9s) and Airbus A350s (a direct competitor to Boeing’s Dreamliner) – which operate on flight routes to Europe, Melbourne and Singapore.
Of course, this is not the first time international airlines have sidelined overweight passengers.
In 2013, Samoa Air was the world’s first airline to charge passengers according to their weight. The now defunct airline asked passengers for one Samoan tala – about 55 cents – for each kilo that they were bringing aboard.
Samoa has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, with nearly three-quarters of its adult population considered obese.
Hawaiian Airlines also introduced a policy for those flying to or from American Samoa’s capital, Pago Pago, whereby passengers were no longer allowed to choose their seats online and were subject to weighing before boarding, so that the airline could redistribute weight in its cabins.
The enforced weigh-in was made after the airline discovered its fuel burn on Pago Pago flights was consistently much higher than projected, indicating the estimated weight for the flight route was inaccurate.
In late 2017, Finnair began weighing its boarding passengers as the airline believed the average weight estimates from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) – a report compiled nine years ago – were off.
EASA estimates the average male weighs 84.6 kilograms, and the average female 66.5kg.
Yet average weights for the Finnish population tend to be slightly higher at 85kg for males and 70kg for females. So Finnair set about conducting its own report, surveying 2000 voluntary passengers to gain more current figures on passengers’ weight.
To estimate how much fuel is required for a flight, an airline must know the weight its aircraft carries.
The heavier the plane, the more expensive the flight, but safety is an important factor too as planes have a maximum take-off weight. –Traveller OPINION: ‘‘Bypass traffic around the central city. Improve traffic flow. Limit increase in traffic level. Reduce traffic along the waterfront.’’
That could have been taken from the planning brief of Let’s Get Wellington Moving, a grouping of the Wellington City Council, the Greater Wellington Regional Council and the New Zealand Transport Agency that was set up to find a solution to the transport issues between Ngauranga and Wellington Airport.
In fact, it’s from a report by San Francisco consulting engineers De Leuw Cather who were investigating a motorway between the Wellington CBD and the rest of the region – in 1963.
It shows how long this gap in our transport network has been recognised, even back when traffic volumes were a fraction of today’s.
Their recommendation that a motorway be built along the foothills and connecting the Thorndon-Ngauranga motorway (then under construction) to Kilbirnie was adopted, with the Thorndon to Terrace Tunnel section completed in the early 1970s.
But due to financial cutbacks, the remainder was canned. That included the part that would have extended the motorway to Mount Victoria by way of a trench with grade-separated intersections at Cuba, Taranaki and Tory streets, as well as the Basin Reserve.
It was the beginning of what has been unsatisfactory fiddling around the problem.
It wasn’t until 2005 that work began on a one-way system linking the Terrace Tunnel and the Basin, and in 2007 we got a ground-level road with traffic lights that caused choke points well past traditional rush hours and accident black spots. Many say it also wrecked the culture of Te Aro.
Crucially, 65 per cent of public submitters want a solution at the Basin, and that mirrors what the business community wants.
So bad is it that in 2013 a crash reduction study was made of two of the road’s signalised intersections, at that time carrying 25,000 to 28,000 vehicles a day.
One of those intersections has one of only three red-light cameras in New Zealand, and it outperforms the other two combined in revenue ($220,000 versus $180,000 in 2016 alone).
This is the sort of mess that comes from less-than-optimal incremental fixes, and we must not let that happen when decisions on the latest Terrace Tunnel to Mount Victoria fix are made.
The recently released summary of the public consultation process certainly gives planners a mandate to get on and solve this bottleneck once and for all.
For the first time since the Basin flyover was rejected in 2014 we have clarity about what a majority of people want: to prioritise public transport, walking and cycling; extra tunnels at The Terrace and Mount Victoria; separation of east-west traffic at the Basin; and cut-andcover through Te Aro.
Crucially, 65 per cent of submitters want a solution at the Basin, and that mirrors what the business community wants.
A survey conducted by the region’s five chambers of commerce showed 54 per cent of respondents favoured option D, which delivers the most benefits including travel time savings and opportunities to regenerate and develop the city. Ninety per cent of respondents supported grade separation at the Basin.
Now we know the most likely direction, there are imperatives that must come into play.
We need to get the corridor right. Once that’s created we can argue about what, in terms of walking or cycling or mass transit, goes in it and how. Business believes mass transit in some form must be part of it.
It’ll be a 10-year build, so we’ve got to get on with it.
Key will be the use of privatepublic partnerships and maybe tolls. They’re bullets that the Government, the main funder in this, must be prepared to bite.
The solution must pay respect to the city’s architecture and skyscape, in much the same way that Pukeahu National War Memorial Park has.
It must be resilient. We must do it once and do it right. We can’t afford a repeat of 1963. ❚ John Milford is the chief executive of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce.