A sickly, 425-pound woman from New York was declared “too fat to fly” and left stranded in Hungary last month, where she later passed away from kidney failure.
According to the New York Post, Vilma Soltesz was travelling in Hungary with her husband, and had planned to resume treatment for illness—a combination of kidney disease and diabetes that caused her to gain water weight—once she returned to the U.S. However, the KLM flight she was booked on to return home was unable to accommodate her large size due to the fact that the crew didn’t have a seatbelt extender. She was asked to leave the plane.
KLM said they would help find an alternate flight for Soltesz, and after several hours and phone calls, told her to drive to Prague to board a Delta aircraft that could accommodate her. However, the Delta crew was unable to load her onto the plane.
Soltesz’s travel agent rebooked her on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt, but again, the crew said they were unable to accommodate her. Soltesz had only one leg and was confined to a wheelchair, which posed additional problems beyond her size; while the plane did have three seats available that could accommodate her size, the crew was unable to load her into the seats.
“We had 140 passengers on board, and they had connections and needed to travel,” Lufthansa spokesman Nils Haupt told the New York Post. “The question was never the seat belt. The question was the mobility of the passenger.”
Soltesz died several days later, still in Hungary. Her husband is launching a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the airlines.
http://www.travelandescape.ca/2012/11/woman-dies-overseas-after-being-declared-too-fat-to-fly/
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