A Chinese Airline is currently putting up with a lot of malice. But she insists on a weight limit introduced in early June.

Since the beginning of June , Flight Attendants at the Chinese company Hainan Airlines have not been allowed to exceed a certain maximum weight, otherwise they could be fired. The upper limit is calculated in relation to body size, various media report. For example, a stewardess who is 1.58 meters tall may weigh a maximum of 49 kilograms.

Female flight attendants who are less than five percent overweight would be screened by the airline once a month to prevent further weight gain. Those who are five to ten percent overweight even weekly, writes the Chinese newspaper Global Times.

mockery on social media

As CNN reports, the weight restriction triggered a fierce public debate. There was malice for the airline, especially on social media. One critic wrote on the Twitter -like platform Weibo: “I just want the flight attendants to be fully qualified and to wear the right clothes in emergencies. Their weight is none of my business.”

Hainan Airlines, however, defended its weight control. The measure is “not a simple criterion for the suspension of a flight attendant, as some media have interpreted.” It applies equally to female and male stewards, it said. However, this had not previously been communicated. In addition, according to CNN, the airline has almost exclusively female cabin crew.

“Promoting Healthy Lifestyles”

The reason for the measure is not purely technical. CNN quotes a Hainan Airlines press release as saying: “The goal is to promote healthy lifestyle habits and maintain a good professional image and healthy body by setting a target weight rather than passively waiting for significant changes in the physical condition of individual crew members and then the work in the security service is impaired.”

Other Asian airlines have also made headlines in recent years for imposing weight restrictions on their cabin crew. In 2015, Air India challenged 125 flight attendants to lose weight. In 2019, Pakistan’s national airline threatened to fire its cabin crew if they failed to comply with weight restrictions.

Source:CNN

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