Ronald Young Jr.

speaker

945 appearances 13 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 24 Aug

Ronald Young Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Search Engine · What’s it like to fly when you’re fat? · 24 Jan 2025 podcast

Right. It's true. The shrinking seat sizes have been so alarming that Congress and the FAA have been called on to intervene.

That's Andrea Sachs, another reporter with The Washington Post. She's been covering travel for 24 years. She's written quite a bit about the intersections of disability and air travel, as well as the experiences of plus-sized folks flying. Andrea filled me in with what happened with Congress.

And to Aubrey's original point, 17 inches wide is actually more generous than what's reported. In some cases and configurations, economy class seats can be as small as 16 inches wide. And keep in mind, this puts you right up next to your seatmate who is also struggling in their 16 inch seat, only 28 inches in some cases from the person in front of them.

So where it stands now is that Congress is putting pressure on the FAA to come up with a minimum seat size that would be considered safe for everyone. This would be the start to solving the cramped travel on a plane and would be helpful to plus-size travelers who are already doing everything they can to not encroach on their neighbors.

And while I think it's a little troubling that the government has to intervene to fix this, we already know that given the opportunity, we can't count on the airlines to do right by its passengers. For instance, let's take a return trip with Bridget home from vacation.

Bridget has flown on Southwest Airlines over 50 times and had never used their customer of size policy. But after her incident with the flight attendant, she didn't want to take any chances. Here's Andrea Sachs again with the policy details.

You also get priority boarding, which is a nice perk when you want to have maximum control of where you're sitting. You do have to pay for the second seat. You receive the refund after you travel, or you have to risk asking at the gate before boarding and have to hope there's room to do it. Bridget paid the extra money and did it online.

But when she got to the airport, she ran into some trouble once again when talking to the ticketing agent.

The gate agent was able to get Bridget one seat on the plane, just one, which put Bridget back in the position she was in during her original trip, at risk of having someone humiliate her while traveling. Bridget wasn't going to put up with this again.

Bridget successfully got on the plane with priority boarding and got the reserved seat next to her, and by all accounts had an uneventful trip home, which is exactly what should have happened the first time.

But I really hate this experience for Bridget and this story really bothers me because Southwest, at least anecdotally, is supposed to be the best airline for fat folks and they're not even getting it right.

Bridget tried to follow the rules and was met with several layers of obstacles and was required to advocate for herself in a way that most fat folks don't necessarily have the energy for when they're just trying to get to their destinations. That's not to say that the open seating and customer of size policies and priority boarding aren't great. They are.

And there are plenty of fat folks who have benefited from these policies and flown comfortably. But Bridget didn't, and others won't, I'm sure. And also, this is a policy of one airline. An airline that, like Hannah Sampson said, is subject to the whims of shareholders and has to make money.

Which means we're depending on them to do right by their passengers, and we have to hope that the right and comfortable policy aligns with the most lucrative one. So unless Congress puts pressure on the FAA to make the airlines do something, there's no guarantee that policies that may benefit fat folks and honestly all folks, like open seating, won't go away. Because open seating is going away.

For plus-size passengers, this means the one airline that was doing the most for fat folks is now going to be just like every other airline. And I just want to get to my final destination with no incidents, major or minor. I'm concerned that eventually I'm going to be marched off the plane. I'm going to be forced to buy a second seat.

I'm going to get my picture taken and go viral for being the fat man on the plane who dared to fly. And I think despite knowing for a fact that it won't be my fault, I'll still bear the blame because I'm fat. My options are to lose weight and don't travel by plane until I do, or wait for an act of Congress.

So, like, if you could wave a wand and fix air travel for fat folks, what would you change specifically?

I don't know if we'll ever see the day where they're designing planes in that way. But until they do, please remember, even fat folks have places to be. And we just want to get there in peace.

I do. So, my friend, Nicole Hill, Brilliant audio producer has a new show that I'm very excited about and I really enjoy. It's called Our Ancestors Were Messy. It's out in February.

Yes, it is so good. It is essentially her diving into the Black newspapers of yesteryear and kind of, instead of telling stories about like segregation and racism, just talking about stories about Black people living and how that looks in the newspapers. Because these are Black newspapers and they were talking about Black people living but there was a lot of gossip that was happening.

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