Concerns over fuel capacity with wrestlers onboard led to national carrier taking the ‘unusual step’ of transferring sumo rikishi to another 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.
Concern over fuel capacity emerged when staff learned late on Thursday that the passenger lists included sumo wrestlers, whom they estimated weighed an average of 120kg – far more than the 70kg average, the Yomiuri said.
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.
“It is extremely unusual for us to operate special flights due to the weight restrictions on this aircraft,” a JAL spokesperson told the regional newspaper the Minami-Nippon Shimbun.
Additional flights were also laid on to take the wrestlers home after the tournament ended on Sunday, according to Japanese media.
It is not the first time the traveling sumo fraternity has made the news. In 2014, a photo of wrestlers packed on to a small passenger plane went viral. The men, all from the Hakkaku stable in Tokyo, later snapped themselves in similarly snug surroundings on a bus on their way to a summer training camp.
There is no minimum weight requirement to become a sumo wrestler – Mainoumi, who reached the top division in the 1990s, weighed about the same as the England rugby captain, Owen Farrell. But the ancient sport is dominated by heavier men. Ōrora, a Russian-born rikishi who retired in 2018, is the heaviest of all time, weighing in at 292.6 kg at his peak.
