Obese woman told she was "too fat to fly" home, dies of kidney failure

[jberryhill]

4. "Sounds like her husband has one hell of a lawsuit on his hands."

Unlikely.

As noted above, she died because she refused to seek medical care.

She did not die because she was denied boarding to an airplane. Your purchase of an airline ticket does not obligate the airline to get you from point A to point B on any particular flight or aircraft. Airlines do not assume liability for operating as emergency ambulances. A commercial passenger flight is not a medical evacuation mission, and it is unreasonable to rely on a commercial passenger flight to be one. That's not the service they offer.

The crew has complete discretion to determine that a particular passenger may present a safety risk. If the passenger cannot be belted in, the plane is not allowed to take off.

As also pointed out above, having a medical condition alone may be a reason to deny boarding. If you are in some sort of terminal condition, they do not have to let you on the plane. Airlines will routinely deny boarding to women in late stages of pregnancy, for one example.

From experience, I was on a flight where a passenger had a medical emergency and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled landing to deplane that passenger. As a consequence, I missed a connecting flight to Nairobi, and this set off a chain of events that was extremely expensive. I certainly don't begrudge getting that guy off for medical attention. But that one guy, who boarded sick, had ripple effects which in the aggregate affected some 200 other people, many of whom also had urgent reasons to get to where they needed to be. Did someone else miss their "critical operation" because of that? Who knows?