The story: Samoa Air plans to institute a pricing model based on the weight of the passengers plus their luggage.
Has anyone ever missed a flight due to weight restrictions? I have. Long story short, I was trying to get on a flight to Mississippi, and according to all information, there were several open seats available. Much to my horror, the door closed right in front of me, and very confused, I asked why no more passengers were being allowed onto the aircraft? Because the aircraft had reached its weight capacity.
Mind you, there were five seats available at this point, which means that the flight reached its weight limit well before reaching its occupancy limit. The passengers already aboard had successfully compensated for the weight of five entire human beings.
Needless to say, I was incensed. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for those who had actually paid a full fare to get on that flight and were denied.
Anyway, no major airline could get away with pulling this kind of stunt. Major airlines also use jumbo jets and way larger aircraft than a dinky company like Samoa Air would be using, so the whole weight issue isn’t as much of a factor on those vessels. Not to mention the whole invasion of privacy that goes with forcing people to weigh in, so that they can be accurately charged for their fares.
But Samoa Air? Makes perfect sense. Have you ever seen a Samoan? All you have to do is flip on WWE programming, because just about every Samoan male is evidently a professional wrestler. The Wild Samoans (pictured above), Yokozuna. Rikishi, Rosey and Jamal. The Rock is half-Samoan, as is one of the members of The Shield, Roman Reigns, who is also part-Samoan himself. Samoans are either massively large, are tanks, or are both. The bottom line is that they’re often times very large men, in one way or another. Yokozuna weighed 600 lbs. at one point. 600 pounds. He consumed multiple seats on airplanes routinely.
Yes, most of the preceding paragraph is hyperbole and jest, but according to the facts, 91% of Samoans over the age of 15 are considered overweight. That’s a whole lot of Rikishis and 3 Minutes Warnings running around. It only makes sense that a dinky airline like Samoa Air would be concerned that charging by seat isn’t going to go anywhere when most of these behemoths are taking up more than just a seat, and forcing the aircraft to hit weight capacity well before occupant capacity. So why shouldn’t they charge by the pound, and actually recoup the revenue they would be losing by seats being taken up by large portions of people too hefty to be confined to a single seat?
