Failure to Launch: One-Person-One-Fare Airline Policy and the Drawbacks to the Disabled-By-Obesity Legal Argument

ABSTRACT

Since January 2009, the Canadian Transportation Agency has required domestic airlines to uphold a one-person-one-fare policy (1P1F), according to which passengers requiring additional seating due to disability – including persons found to be functionally disabled by obesity – are entitled to it without extra cost. In this article, the authors show that the jurisprudence that upholds 1P1F by design makes possible domestic airline policy and practice that impose undue obstacles for, and offend the dignity of, fat persons. Specifically, because fat flyers must prove their condition is disabling, the medical documentation they must submit discursively pathologizes their bodies. Further, the process travelers must undergo to complete and submit documentation in order to qualify for the 1P1F accommodation perpetuates, even exacerbates, their vulnerability to discriminatory treatment. The authors ultimately show that policies and processes developed to comply with Canada’s 1P1F standard do pathologizing and stigmatizing work because airlines have an economic interest in holding to the “disabled by obesity” model rather than adjusting the normative geographies they produce (and profit from) on flights.

KEYWORDS:

• One-person-one-fare
• disability
• air travel
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Obesity is the language used in law. The term is in scare quotes in accordance with this journal’s formatting guidelines.

2. International flights do not fall within the Memorandum’s purview; nor do charter carriers, but the Agency has expressed the hope that if major airlines implement 1P1F the standard may spread across Canada’s airline industry. The Memorandum, specifically its application outside domestic flights, is being put to the test in the ongoing Delta Air Lines Inc. v Lukacs, (2018) SCC 2.

3. In our review of aircraft interior specifications, we found that higher priced cabins in some aircraft (called “premium” cabins in Air Canada Rouge, Porter, and Swoop aircraft, and “plus” cabins in WestJet Encore aircraft) provide greater seat pitch for extra legroom, but not greater seat width compared to economy cabin seats. Otherwise, the key feature that distinguishes economy from higher priced cabins across Canadian airlines is seat width.

4. Air Canada makes the interior specifications for their fleet, including seat width, publicly available. Other airlines are not forthcoming around seat width in their interior specs, so we consulted with a crowd-sourced guide Seat Guru, which identifies seat widths for the fleets of large airlines. While determining the seat widths of regional airline fleets proved to be a more difficult feat via these methods, we did find that regional and major airlines purchased aircraft from the same manufacturers, and typically hold aircraft models in common.

5. The Canadian Transportation Agency Decision No. 6-AT-A-2008 only applies to the airlines represented in the lawsuit, but domestic airlines tend to implement a 1P1F standard to avoid potential lawsuits.

6. Light aircraft includes seaplanes, helicopters, medivacs, charters, and cargo carriers. Domestic tariffs treat seating for 29 vs 30 passengers as a dividing line when stipulating terms and conditions for aircrafts.

7. Specifically: Air Inuit, Air North Yukon, Flair Airlines, Northstar Air, Pacific Coastal Airlines, Perimeter Aviation, Transwest Air, Wasaya Airlines, and WestWing Aviation. Porter Airlines also lacks explicit reference to “obesity” in their domestic tariffs, but its accommodation application process uses a medical form that references 1P1F.

8. Air Canada (Section 4aii), Air Creebec (Rule 71), and Canadian North (Rule 21) explicitly identify that they provide extra seating as an accommodation at no cost. Calm Air (Rule 17), Provincial Airlines (Rule 25), and WestJet (Rule 71) call this type of accommodation a One Person One Fare program.

9. Medicalization refers to processes by which an embodied difference (eg, disability) or bodily process (eg, pregnancy) is made sense of solely through a medical lens. Medicalization props up medical authorities as experts over the bodies of marginalized populations.

10. WestJet Link is the result of an agreement with Pacific Coastal Airlines, a smaller Canadian airline that operates scheduled, charter, and cargo flights in British Columbia and Alberta. While the Pacific Coastal Airline tariffs do not refer to obesity in their section on accommodating disability, and their website does not offer a medical form to complete in order to qualify for a second no-cost seat, potential passengers book WestJet Link flights through WestJet. They would thus have access to the WestJet medical form. Swoop provides its own medical form on their website; it is identical in all but font color to the WestJet medical form.

11. The Sunwing form asks for passengers to select the box “do you require the use of an additional seat?” and follows the question with the parenthetical “(Additional cost),” which indicates that the accommodation of extra seating is only supplied at the expense of the passenger.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jen Rinaldi

Jen Rinaldi is an Assistant Professor in Legal Studies at Ontario Tech University. Her research takes up how non-normative bodies (in particular, cripped, Mad, fat, and queer bodies) are read, marked, and produced in and through socio-legal discourse. She is committed to uncovering how embodied subjects negotiate, are impacted by, and resist biopolitical axes invested in their formation. Rinaldi is a member of the Recounting Huronia Collective, and the coordinator of the Huronia Survivors Speakers Bureau. Her publication record includes Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice (co-edited with May Friedman and Carla Rice), Bearing the Weight of the World: Exploring Maternal Embodiment (co-edited with Alys Einion), and Institutional Violence and Disability: Punishing Conditions (co-authored with Kate Rossiter).

Carla Rice

Dr. Carla Rice is a Canada Research Chair in Care, Gender, and Relationships in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at University of Guelph, and the founder and academic director of The Re•vision Centre for Art and Social Justice (formally Project Re•Vision, see www.projectrevision.ca). A leader in the field of body image within Canada, she is a founding member and former director of innovative initiatives such as the National Eating Disorder Information Centre and the Body Image Project at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. Currently, Dr. Rice is carrying out research in conjunction with her Partnership Grant “Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life” (see www.bodiesintranslation.ca) that seeks to centralize culturally, cognitively, affectively, and physically diverse artist practitioners as members of communities whose voices and self-representations have been marginalized from mainstream social discourses, cultural landscapes and art institutions across our province and country. Dr. Rice founded Project Re•Vision and the Revisioning Differences Media Arts Laboratory (REDLAB), an assemblage of cutting-edge arts-based research projects and a state-of-the-art media-lab, which seek to explore how communities can use arts-informed research to advance social inclusion and justice by challenging stereotypes.

Emily Lind

Emily Lind is a College Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia. Her research examines the intersections between power, embodiment, and identity. Recent publications explore feminist approaches to pregnancy loss, whiteness and anti-racist feminism, the discursive construction of single motherhood, weight stigma in reproductive health care, and fat liberation.