They joined the mile-high chub.
Japan Airlines needed to schedule an additional flight over concerns that a gaggle of sumo wrestlers exceeded the load limit for 2 planes.
“It is amazingly unusual for us to operate special flights attributable to the load restrictions on this aircraft,” an airline representative told local outlet Minami-Nippon Shimbun, per The Guardian.
The nightmare at 30,000 kilos occurred when the titanic tusslers were slated to fly from Tokyo and Osaka to attend the Special National Sports Festival on Amami Ōshima Island, Japan News reported.
Nonetheless, after calculating that the sumo wrestlers weighed a whopping 264.55 kilos on average — 100 kilos greater than the everyday passenger, per Japan Airlines — travel authorities grew concerned that the 2 Boeing 737-800s wouldn’t have the opportunity to hold the requisite amount of fuel attributable to weight restrictions.
Furthermore, Amami Airport is thought to be difficult each to reach at and depart from, especially for giant aircraft.
In an effort to ensure the right weight distribution, the airline decided to book an extra flight for 27 members of the sumo crew on the last minute.
Fourteen of them needed to fly from Osaka to Tokyo first to board this special flight.
Like super-sized swallows returning to Capistrano, a whopping 460 sumo wrestlers descended on the island to attend the bash.
Passenger weight has been a degree of contention within the friendly skies of late.
A video sparked outrage in May by showing a passenger being weighed before takeoff as if she was luggage, following confusion about her weight.
In 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that airlines could soon require plus-sized passengers to step on the size — or provide their weight — before boarding the aircraft.
The goal was to supply recent data on average passenger weights, as the present numbers reportedly don’t reflect today’s sky-high obesity rates within the US.
In turn, this might help be sure that aircrafts, especially the small ones, don’t exceed their allowable weight limit.
Once they’ve chosen a traveler, an operator may “determine the actual weight of passengers” by having them step “on a scale before boarding the aircraft,” per the rules reported by AirInsight.
Nonetheless, the regulatory agency backpedaled a month later, claiming that while weighing passengers was an option, most airlines would resort to other measures of calculating passenger mass.