Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Wednesday the 14th of February and I want to talk about a topic which is sensitive

but about which a large amount of nonsense has been talked and And this is the question of weighing passengers,

and more broadly, what the approach should be to plus-sized travellers on planes.

Are they being fairly treated?

This came about because Finnair, the National Airl airline of Finland, of course, merely requested that

passengers checking in at Helsinki Airport would discreetly be asked if they could be weighed. There's a

really good reason for that, because there's assumptions made by aviation authorities about how much passengers weigh.

Those are used by the airlines at higher weight for men than for women.

And of course, you need to add something for their baggage.

That has implications for safety because you've got to make sufficient allowance.

And furthermore, it has implications for the

environment because the heavier the passengers and their stuff the more fuel it will use and

all that happened is that in Finland they want to understand if their estimates are still correct

and it would not surprise me at all if they find they've got to

increase the estimates. I'm just looking at the health survey for England in 2021.

26% of adults in England, obese. A further 38% classedasters overweight but not obese.

That means they've got a body max index of over 25

and bluntly 64%, almost two in three of English adults

are classed as overweight or obese.

So that is a problem, I think, for society,

but it's also a problem for the airlines, because a couple of things are happening at the same time as we overall, on average, are getting bigger. The first one is that airlines are much, much better at filling their aircraft.

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