Ah—the luxury of air travel! Knees tucked under your jaw. Feet wedged against the bag
you stuffed beneath the seat in front of you. One elbow in your hip crease. The other fighting
your neighbor for space on the arm rest. And the comforting “thud-thud-thud” of a kid
kicking your seatback from the row behind you. It’s everything you could want -- not!
But this isn’t a clown car. And I’m a big guy—with a matching belly! So why are
airline seats so dang small?!
Well, there is cause for hope that they’ll soon get bigger. I’ll tell you why in a
minute, but for now… If you must get up to visit the bathroom—everyone else has
to swing their knees to the side while you slither past. And if you still can’t fit,
they’ll have to stand up and then Do-se-do with you in the aisle. You might even have
to wake them first. Which takes time so—unless you can do all this with your legs crossed—plan
in advance!
It’s enough to make anyone want to spend their vacation money—money meant for dinners,
shows, and souvenirs—on a slightly bigger seat in First Class!
It wasn’t always this way. Maybe you’ve seen ads for ultra-fancy aircrafts with seats
that become beds, hot showers, and cocktail bars and you thought, “Wow, someday, in
the future, when I’m rich, I’ll fly like that!” But those amenities were normal in
the past. Well, not the showers, but as late as the 1970’s… Traveling First Class on
an airplane often meant access—on the plane, during the flight— to lounges boasting everything
from dining areas with tables and table cloths—to cocktail bars with leopard print seats! And
this stuff wasn’t just for the super-rich—or the moderately rich—American Airline’s
Economy Class had a piano bar!
OK, the piano was really a small electric organ, but the airline hired a live piano
player to entertain the passengers who stood around it—or sat, unbelted, on giant ottomans—and
sang!
To be fair, passengers have changed as much as airlines. Last week I tried to start a
sing-along in my row and my seatmates shushed me! (Ya Party poopers!)
But, while we might complain about how things have changed for us, that crying baby three
rows over? Well, she should be grateful. In the 1950’s parents could tuck junior into
a basket that hung off the side of the overhead compartment!
OK, Baby, I know that five-point harness in your belted-in baby carrier is frustrating.
I hear you crying! You want to practice rolling over and a hammock sounds good to you. But
what if you fell out during turbulence? You’re safer now.
So, we agree—we adults anyway— that the overhead baby thing was a bad idea. But the
bar and lounge sound pretty good. What happened to them? And what does their demise have to
do with … seat size?
You’ve probably guessed that money is at the root of this. You see, airlines have two
main priorities.
Their first priority is to get you to your destination safely: that’s why they never
take off without giving you instructions about what to do in an emergency. (We’ll talk
about how safety impacts seat size – and how it might even make your seats bigger—in
a moment.)
The airline’s second priority is to make money. Airlines are in business. And no matter
how much money a business is making… they always want more. And while airlines don’t
sell seats (you can’t take them with you), they do rent them for the duration of a trip:
one to a ticket.
So, the more seats, the more tickets. And the more tickets, the more money.
That’s why first the lounges went… To make room for more seats!
Then, well, if seats are smaller, you can fit more of them into a plane.
So, the seats got smaller to make room for more—smaller—seats! Airlines measure seat
room using something called “pitch.” When you think about it, “pitch” is an alarming
word: in baseball, the best pitches are ones no one can hit. Pitch means sticky tar—or
something steep—like the steep price of an airline ticket!
A sales pitch can trick you into buying something you don’t need—and when airplanes measure
“pitch,” it is a little misleading. Pitch doesn’t measure leg room (we all have different
sized legs anyway). Pitch doesn’t measure the distance from the edge of your seat cushion
to the back of the seat in front of you. (They’d rather you didn’t know that).
Pitch refers to the space between two identical parts on a seat. A 29-inch pitch does not
mean you have 29 inches to sit in. It means that there are 29 inches between the edge
of your seat and the edge of the seat in front of you.
29 inches to accommodate:
—your legs from the knees down. —your feet
—that tucked-under-the-seat-in-front-of-you bag
—the back of the seat in front of you—including —the little pocket for magazines and flight
information and —the fold down table
And! —The whole other passenger in front of you—including
their back cushion—from their knees up (where it starts all over again).
That’s pitch!
In the 1950’s Boeing’s 707—a cool plane --widely considered the first commercial jet—had
a pitch of 34 inches—but it’s not like people back then were staying in their seats.
They were traipsing off to get a drink at the piano bar!
Today—with no lounge to hang out in—we are really stuck in our seats! And I do mean
stuck. Seats have shrunk from that once roomy 34-inch pitch to as low as 29 inches. We’ve
lost five inches. Meanwhile, the average American man’s weight has jumped from 166 to nearly
200 pounds. (And that’s just the average, nearly half of us are bigger!)
That means, while pitch has shrunk by 15 percent, passengers have grown by 17 percent! That’s
a lot of scrunching! Hey, is that why airline food is notoriously unappetizing? Are they
hoping we won’t eat it and somehow lose weight inflight? That’s… not a good sales
pitch.
On top of that, we’re all about an inch taller. And seat width has diminished too!
In the 1990’s, the narrowest seats were 19 inches; today the widest seat in economy
is skinnier than that! And some seats are as little as 17 inches wide. If your hips
measure 40 inches around—you’ve got a problem!
Now, the airlines will tell you that they’ve redesigned the seats in such a way that you’ll
never notice this shrinking pitch. For example: by making the cushion at your back thinner—or
in Airline speak, “less bulky.”
But please, My knees Disagrees Oooh— The squeeze!
(sorry—couldn’t help myself!)
It’s not just knees who are complaining. The U.S. Congress is worried too. They may,
or may not, be “fat cats” in congress, but you don’t have to be overweight to feel
cramped in an airline seat. And congress is right to worry about what could go wrong if
passengers are wedged so tightly in their seats that crowded conditions slow them down.
Remember how much trouble it was to get to the bathroom? Hopefully, that’s not an emergency.
But what if you were flying when a real emergency occurred? Flight evacuations are rare —in
fact airplanes are widely, and rightly, considered the safest way to travel—but emergencies
do happen.
When a plane is in trouble, every second counts. Passengers need to evacuate quickly. You want
to grab your flotation device and whoosh down that inflatable slide—or jump into the waiting
raft—OK, I hope it never happens, but it does sound fun!—or just get out as quickly
and calmly as possible.
And some passengers have small children that slow them down, while elderly fliers may already
be moving a bit slowly to begin with. Right now, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)
plans to spend 12 days testing and measuring evacuation times. A few members of Congress
expressed concern that the test evacuees might all be slim athletes and – in an exciting
show of congressional co-operation—congress is using its oversight to make sure that at
least some of the test evacuees have physical disabilities and other impediments common
in the general population.
The chances that you’ll ever need to evacuate an airplane are as slim as I wish I was, but
the silver lining of that unlikely scenario is that Congress may insist that we all get
bigger seats again! That’s a winning pitch!
And if you win the lottery before that happens? Please -- buy me a ticket on one of those
planes with the hot showers! Okay wake up, it’s only a dream….
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