Cry-Baby of the Week: Pakistan’s National Airline

Cry Baby Of The Week is a series that pinpoints those who make for facepalm fodder, through the most zero chill moments ripped apart for your reading and critiquing pleasure.

The incident: Pakistan's national airline service Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has asked cabin crew members they consider overweight to drop their “extra” kilos within six months or run the risk of remaining grounded. They're calling it an attempt to make their cabin members "slim, smart and fit" so they don’t appear “shabby”, alongside chalking out a weight chart for employees to follow.

The ideal behaviour: Stop giving a fuck about your employees’ appearances and focus on making sure they have the appropriate qualification to fly in the first place.

The cry baby’s behaviour: In a memo distributed to about 1,800 crew members on January 1, 2019, PIA said that they either needed to keep their weight in check or face being grounded. A move aimed at cutting back the excess weight limits, the airline obviously thought that asking its crew to shed their body mass was more important than reducing baggage allowance limits.

The process, termed as a “regular, routine matter” by officials, involves a weight check of the cabin crew for the “perusal of management”, after which the crew would have to report to a “grooming cell” before they can receive flying clearance. About 100 people, ie 5% of the crew, have been asked to lose their “excess weight” to avoid being grounded.

Because between realising that most of your employees are “ghosts”, including pilots with fake matriculation certificates and having customers complaining about unkempt in-flight cabins, dictating ideal beauty standards to cabin crew needs to be high on the priority list, right?

This isn’t the first instance of such frivolousness amongst airline companies (throwback to 2015 when Air India basically did the same shit and when GoAir decided to only recruit female crew to save fuel, instead of the 'heavier' male flight pursers). Restricting cabin crew and especially, air hostesses, to a specific weight group has been an age-old practice, with cheap tactics that sometimes include issuing only one uniform that cannot be altered if you put on any weight.

In popular imagination, air hostesses have been associated with full-face makeup, a docile disposition and heels that click on a different kind of runway, but aren’t we over these societal standards already? I mean, do people even give a shit about this stuff on a flight? Sure, we like to have them smiling at us and we love it when they’re offering us free substandard food, but how important is a “well-groomed” crew member compared to one who is experienced, well-trained and healthy? Especially at a time when body positivity as a cultural movement is in full bloom. But unlike their employees this week, it looks like this Pakistani airline never got the memo.

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