Home Scandal and Gossip Sandy Russell is kicked off a plane for being too fat to...

Sandy Russell is kicked off a plane for being too fat to fly.

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The despair and humiliation, and the missed flight to see his dying aunt.

Some rules are horrid or just plain brutal. Obviously they exist to enforce certain codes, but sometimes special mitigating circumstances ought to be considered. That said, tonight Sandy Russell is a devastated man and there was nothing he could do….

News.com.au A 203kg man who says he was thrown off a flight for being too fat has missed the chance to say goodbye to his dying aunt.

Sandy Russell, from Wolverhampton in England, said a stewardess told him to leave the Air Transat plane from London Gatwick to Toronto because he could not fit in his seat.

He was told he must pay for two seats if he wanted to catch the next available flight to visit his aunt who was dying of bowel cancer in Canada.

Mr Russell was unable to pay the $1564 fare and his aunt died two days after he was due to visit her.

One could argue Mr Russell should have been aware of such provisions and made arrangements to acquire two seats before booking his flight, or perhaps even had called authorities and explained authorities to explain his tenuous circumstances. But then again, perhaps Mr Russell had no clue that certain regulations were enforced until it was too late.

Air Transat said Mr Russell’s 52-inch girth meant that the armrest could not be lowered for take-off, as demanded by regulations.

The passenger said he was angry he wasn’t made aware that his size was a problem before he boarded the plane.

A spokesman for the airline said Air Transat was not allowed to ask passengers their measurements before they booked a flight as it was “a breach of their human rights”.

A valid thought no doubt. After all airlines must comply with standards as must passengers, even if unfortunately they had no idea of those standards in the first place. After all how fat do you have to be to be denied a seat and a chance to say a final good bye to your aunt?

What a horrid series of events indeed.






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2 COMMENTS

  1. He was kicked off the plane because he was too poor to pay the fare he was required to pay to get on the flight.

    So now every time someone can’t afford something we will have to read an article about how outrageous it is that people must pay for things and that sometimes they are more expensive than people can afford.

    If this jackass had spent a few dollars less on cheeseburgers he could have paid the fare.

  2. where’s the article about the poor people that would have to sit next to the fat bastard for who knows how many hours? the seats are built for average sized people, LOGICALLY they can only fit certain sized people, if you are considerably larger then you suck it up and buy two seats, you lose some weight or you don’t fly, simple as that.

    articles like this piss me off. They don’t have seats for people that weight 203 KILOGRAMS. WHAT!? that’s an outrage, next thing you’ll tell me is there are no seats for conjoined twins or 8 foot tall people. It’s not average and it makes no logical sense for an airliner to cater to the minority.

    I will acknowledge that overweight is not necessarily a minority in many western countries (how politically correct of me!) none the less it does not change my core argument.

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