Hawaiian Airlines will continue assigning seats on some flights according to passengers’ weights, after federal complaints that the policy is discriminatory to people of Samoan descent were turned down.
The airline instituted the economy measure earlier this month, after noticing that flights from Honolulu to Pago Pago in American Samoa were burning more fuel due to their heavy payload.
A six-month voluntary passenger survey showed that each traveller and their luggage weighed 30lb (14kg) more than the airline’s estimate when calculating the cost of fuel.
“What they’re saying is Samoans are obese,” one man told the Associated Press at Honolulu International Airport earlier in October.
In response, Hawaiian Airlines chief operating officer Jon Snook said: “That’s an entirely incorrect assumption.”
Six complaints were filed with the US transportation department, alleging that the practice of weighing passengers was discriminatory.
The complaints were denied, a spokesman told the AP last week, leaving American Samoa as the only Hawaiian Airlines flight without seat pre-selection. Once passengers have been weighed they are given seats in a pattern designed to enhance fuel efficiency.
Hawaiian Airlines told the AP it had conducted weight surveys on other flights, but had not found evidence that excess weight was a problem.
The airline is not the first to use weight to determine seating: Samoa Air started charging according to weight in 2013.
Then, Samoa Air chief executive Chris Langton told CNN: “The next step is for the industry to make those sort of changes and recognize that, hey, we are not all 72kg (160lb) any more and we don’t all fit into a standard seat.
“What makes airplanes work is weight. We are not selling seats, we are selling weight.”
According to the CIA world fact book, American Samoa has the highest rate of adult obesity in the world, with Samoa sixth. The top nine countries on the list are Pacific islands, with Kuwait 10th.
Samoa, Fiji and Tonga are leading exporters of rugby players, mostly to Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
Tonga, which has a population of a little over 106,500, supplied players to seven other teams at the 2015 World Cup, among them the England forwards Mako and Billy Vunipola and the Wales No 8 Taulupe Faletau. The double World Cup-winning New Zealand flanker Jerome Kaino was born in Faga’alu, in American Samoa.
Stereotypes of people from Pacific island nations as large, obese and strong have become a world issue not just through rugby, but with the approaching release of Moana, an animated Disney movie which features Maui, a Polynesian god.
Jenny Salesa, a New Zealand politician of Tongan heritage, said recently the Maui character had been made to look “half-pig, half-hippo”.
Hawaiian Airlines operates one plane, an Airbus A330, that is decorated with the characters from Moana.
