Imagine taking 200-300 people, packing them into narrow seats in rows sometimes as close as 28 inches apart, then locking the door and sending the whole assembly five miles into the sky with only vending machine snacks for food.
What could possibly go wrong?
There is a plastic wedge sold online called "The Knee Defender"
It was created by Ira Goldman, who stands 6'3'' and was tired of being on a flight and having the person in front of him recline the seat smack into his knees.
There is a plastic wedge sold online called "The Knee Defender"
It was created by Ira Goldman, who stands 6'3'' and was tired of being on a flight and having the person in front of him recline the seat smack into his knees.
So, Ira Goldman invented a wedge that fits between the tray table supports and the seat back preventing the passenger in front of you from reclining their seat.
You can then just cross your fingers that they'll think the seat is broken or you can offer the card that comes with The Knee Defender, explaining what you've just done.
It's hard to know which approach is more arrogant.
A passenger used Ira's invention on United Airlines Flight 1462 from Newark to Denver only to discover that the woman in front of him was having none of it.
Both passengers were sitting in United's Economy Plus section, the part of the plane that has four more inches of legroom than the rest of coach.
The fight started when the male passenger, seated in a middle seat of row 12, used the Knee Defender to stop the woman in front of him from reclining while he was on his laptop, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak.
A flight attendant asked him to remove the device and he refused. The woman then stood up, turned around and threw a cup of water at him, the official says. That's when United decided to land in Chicago. The two passengers were not allowed to continue to Denver.
The TSA would not name the passengers.
The plane eventually landed in Denver, arriving 1 hour and 38 minutes late, according to the airline's website.
The Federal Aviation Administration leaves it up to individual airlines to set rules about the device. United Airlines said it prohibits use of the device. Spirit Airlines and Allegiant Air take the reclining mechanisms out of their seats, leaving them permanently upright.
If you are on a flight, particularly a long one, you know about the "seat of torture". Personally, I cannot feel my numbed ass or feet half way through any flight because of being packed into my seat like a sardine in a can.
And things could get even more heated. Changes are happening now, as major U.S. carriers look for new ways to pump up profits by either adding to or reducing the number of coach seats, increasing legroom or cutting the distance between rows.
You might call it a game of aeronautical chairs that will directly affect passenger comfort, convenience and cost.
Are the seats getting smaller? Closer together? Are passengers getting bigger? Are we getting angrier?
Well, no. Yes. Yes. And it's unclear.
Americans are getting bigger, says Kathleen Robinette, who's studied human body measurements for the U.S. Air Force for three decades.
But in general, the problem's "not you-it's the seat," she says.
Since Robinette's first
airline seat study for NASA and the FAA in 1978, she has a different
perspective when she boards an airliner. "I always see all kinds of arms
hanging out into the aisles. That means the seats are too narrow, and
there's nowhere for the shoulders and arms to go except into the aisle
because there's not enough room in the seat."
When "you keep getting your arm whacked by the cart as it comes down the aisle," don't feel guilty, she says. It happens to everybody. "And it's because of the seats."
In 1962, the U.S.
government measured the width of the American backside in the seated
position. It averaged 14 inches for men and 14.4 inches for women. Forty
years later, an Air Force study directed by Robinette showed male and
female butts had blown up on average to more than 15 inches.
The truth is that an airplane seat is a revenue generator. If you look at a 737 or A320 there
are three seats on each side.
If you wanted maximum comfort you could
do two on each side and make the seats a lot wider. But with the
reduced head count the operational costs don't generate enough profit for the Airlines.
However, the American rear end isn't really the important statistic here, Robinette says.
Nor are the male hips, which the industry mistakenly used to determine seat width sometime around the 1960s, she says.
"It's the wrong dimension. The widest part of your body is your shoulders and arms. And that's much, much bigger than your hips. Several inches wider."
Furthermore, she says, women actually have larger hip width on average
than men.
The industry used the
male hip as a seat measuring stick "thinking that it would accommodate
the women too, but in fact they don't accommodate the larger women."
The result: Airline
seats are approximately 5 inches too narrow, she says. And that's for
passengers in the 1960s, let alone the super sized U.S. travelers of
today.
Current standard coach
seat widths range from 17 to 19 inches between the armrests, and that little piece of real estate is known in the airline industry
as "living space."
The term seems
appropriate for some non-stop transoceanic flights that will have you
inhabiting your "living space" for up to 18 hours.
"One of the most
important things about a comfortable seat is the ability to move in it,"
Robinette says. "You have to be able to readjust your posture every so
often for it to stay comfortable." Otherwise, she warns, passengers put
themselves at risk of deep vein thrombosis, a serious health condition
affecting people prone to blood clots.
Sitting in place for long periods
can lead to clotting in veins. Clots can break loose, travel through
the bloodstream and lodge in the lungs, blocking blood flow.
Although America's butts are bulging, it doesn't appear that economy class seats are following suit.
"Our seating surfaces
are contemporary appropriate," says a spokesman for Southwest
Airlines. The airline is in the process of reconfiguring seating on its
entire fleet. But it's not changing the width.
Seat rows aboard Southwest Boeing 737-700s are moving closer together. In airline-seat speak the operative word is "pitch."
Pitch
is defined as the distance between one point on a seat and the same
point on the seat behind. A typical seat pitch in coach measures from 31
to 35 inches.
Southwest's new pitch
configuration moves its rows about an inch closer together, from 32 to
31 inches, according to the airline. In addition, economy seats will
move only two inches during recline instead of three, the airline says.
Bottom line: Southwest's
new economy class seats will allow for six additional coach seats per
plane. Bonus: The new seats weigh less, which will save about $10
million in yearly fuel costs.
Now, if rows are moving closer together, we're playing footsie with legroom.
Over the past few years carriers have been moving toward a standard of charging more for seats with extra legroom.
These include seats in
the forward coach cabins and emergency aisles that used to cost the same
as other economy class seats.
Also, some airlines have reconfigured
seats to add a bit more legroom in certain aisles, for a price.
It looks like coach
seats won't be getting any bigger any time soon. That's largely because
consumers don't demand bigger seats, Robinette says.
Instead, most consumers demand
low fares while airlines consider profits as their first priority, so that's what airlines focus on, making money.
"The manufacturers are
perfectly willing to make the wider seats," Robinette says. "They
understand the issues".
But their customers are the airlines. They're giving the airlines what they ask for which is to test the extremes of how far passengers allow themselves to be squashed into smaller and smaller spaces of discomfort.
This will continue until, and if ever there are enough passengers who also demand that airlines treat them like human beings, not as cows herded into a "cattle pen".
A "cattle pen" is defined in the dictionary as an enclosure for holding livestock. The term describes multiple types of enclosures that may confine one or many animals. It also fits the manner in which the Airline Industry views us as its customers.
All of us need to finally come to understand the only difference between air travel and a cattle pen, is that the cows get nutritionally healthier food to eat than we do.
