AIRLINE SQUEEZE, RECLINE YOUR SEAT OR NOT?

A battle broke out this week on Sunday, August 24th aboard a jetliner, two passengers fighting over the small space that separated their seats

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.

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.

Once they arrived at O'Hare, Chicago Police and TSA officers met the flight, spoke to the passengers,a man and a woman, both 48 and "deemed it a customer service issue".

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.

For something as seemingly simple as stuffing rear ends between two armrests inside a flying metal tube, it kind of feels like there's some anger up there.

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.