They joined the mile-high chub.
Japan Airlines had to book an extra flight over concerns that a group of sumo wrestlers exceeded the weight limit for two planes.
“It is extremely unusual for us to operate special flights due to the weight restrictions on this aircraft,” an airline representative told local outlet Minami-Nippon Shimbun, per The Guardian.
The nightmare at 30,000 pounds occurred while the titanic tusslers were slated to fly from Tokyo to Osaka to attend the Special National Sports Festival on Amami Oshima Island, Japan News reported.
However, after calculating that each of the sumo wrestlers weighed a whopping 264.55 pounds on average — 100 more than the typical passenger, per Japan Airlines — travel authorities grew concerned that the two Boeing 737-800s wouldn’t be able to carry the requisite amount of fuel due to weight restrictions.
Not to mention that Amami Airport is notoriously difficult to take off and land from, especially for large aircraft.
In order to ensure the proper weight distribution, the airline decided to book an additional flight for 27 members of the sumo crew at the last minute.
Fourteen of them had to fly from Osaka to Tokyo first to board this special flight.
Like super-sized swallows returning to Capistrano, a whopping 460 sumo wrestlers descended on the island to attend the bash.
Passenger weight has been a point of contention in the friendly skies of late.
A video sparked outrage in May after showing a passenger being weighed like luggage before takeoff after confusion over her weight.
In 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) advisory announced that airlines could soon require plus-sized passengers to step on the scale — or provide their weight — before boarding the aircraft.
The goal was to provide new data on average passenger weights as the current numbers reportedly don’t reflect today’s sky-high obesity rates in the US.
In turn, this would help ensure that aircrafts, especially the small ones, don’t exceed their allowable weight limit.
Once they’ve chosen a traveler, an operator may “determine the actual weight of passengers” by having them step “on a scale before boarding the aircraft,” per the guidelines transcribed by AirInsight.
However, the regulatory agency backpedaled a month later, claiming that while weighing passengers was an option, most airlines would resort to other measures of calculating passenger mass.