I have flown a lot till about 6 years ago.
On a return from Europe, we flew out of Mulhouse to De Galle. Our flight was late because of fog in Mulhouse, which is on the Rhine We were put on a flight from DeGalle about 3 hours later because we missed our flight. Not so bad.
I got on the plane and our seats were separate. I took the seat on the aisle last row. No reclining. Every seat
filled up except the one in front of me. No one boarded for over 5 minutes. Then a guy filled the aisle about 350 pounds or more.
Of course he sat in the seat in front of me. And scrunched next to the guy in the middle seat next to him. Without adjusting his seat it moved back and was almost in my lap. The flight was going to be 9 hours to SF where we caught a local to San Diego.
I asked the attendant can i fly in the flight seat where they fly. Not allowed but it was allowed for me to sit with the sweaty fat guy in my lap. I wrote to the airlines, but no reply and the only solution i was given get on a later flight.
I’m probably going to get attacked for this. My experience with the extremely, morbidly obese is they have some kind of mental problem. I can’t recall running into anyone that obese in the professional military contracting world where I worked and that may have been because someone that mentally damaged simply can’t work at the required level to be in that world. But the, say, a hundred-pound overweight types were there, and each one had some set of idiosyncratic behaviors that made working with them problematic in one way or another. What I have learned is, if they’re impinging on your space and you say anything, be prepared for the blowback. It’s YOUR fault, YOUR problem. This is just one reasons why I’ll go out of my way to avoid any form of public transport. A certain segment of the public is just a ball of problems waiting for a moment to explode. Admittedly, it’s the minority, but why put yourself in that position if you don’t have to? And, as you found out, the people in charge in whatever the situation is, are not going to get involved because they don’t want to be the focus of that blowback. It is your problem. Not theirs.