You know you take sumo wrestling seriously when you last-minute schedule an entire extra flight for a group of your homeland's sumo wrestlers so they can safely travel to a sports festival on Amami Island.
Yes, a group of sumo wrestlers were too big, and they exceeded the weight limit on the two flights they had initially scheduled for their trip out of Tokyo's Haneda Airport, so Japan Airlines had to schedule them an extra flight.
Japan's flagship carrier has been forced to lay on an extra flight at short notice after concluding that two of its planes were at risk of exceeding their weight limits. The culprit was not excess baggage, however, but a passenger list that included some of the country's heaviest men.
Japan Airlines took the "very unusual" step of transferring a number of sumo wrestlers to a hastily arranged special flight last week over concerns that the two aircraft they had originally been due to fly would be unable to carry sufficient fuel due to weight restrictions.
The sumo rikishi were scheduled to take Boeing 737-800 flights from Haneda airport in Tokyo and Itami airport in Osaka to Amami Oshima, an island in the far south, where they were due to compete in a sports festival, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said.
Your average Japanese person weighs about 160 pounds, but these guys weigh an average of 265 pounds, which is perfect if you want to nudge someone out of a circle, but not so much if you want to fly safely as a group over the ocean.
The Amami airport runway would have struggled to accommodate a larger aircraft, the newspaper said, forcing JAL to lay on an additional service for 27 wrestlers, including 14 who had to fly from Itami to Haneda to board the special flight.
That's 14 wrestlers, times 265, which means 3,710 pounds of man bod had to be transferred to a separate flight in order to safely fly these planes. Do the math, and that's 7,155 total pounds of man they had to break up in order to make this work. Honestly, that's amazing.
It sounds like they did have the aircraft to make the initial flights happen, they just didn't trust the runway with such a large carrier. Still, this is hilarious. Like, imagine working for Japan Airlines and having the wrench in your day be sumo wrestlers. For some reason, I think it would've made my day better, not worse. I mean, that's enough to cheer you right up.
Anyhow, it sounds like the ride home was a bit less of a debacle.
Additional flights were also laid on to take the wrestlers home after the tournament ended on Sunday, according to Japanese media.
Hey, at least they were prepared the second time.
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