The incredible shrinking airline seat
STOPPING THE SQUEEZE
Our concern is that it will take a Titanic-type disaster to make a change if we don’t get regulation Paul Hudson, Flyers Rights
The ever-shrinking airline seat may have finally reached its limit, writes Justin Bachman
Every so often, officials at US company Rockwell Collins pitch a one-day job offer to residents near its North Carolina design centre: earn US$100 ($138) for sitting in an aeroplane seat for eight hours.
Show up for the gig, and there isn’t a drinks trolley or a flight attendant in sight. The rows of seats are arrayed in a testing area at the company’s design and engineering complex. Even without any engine hum or overhead bins, “it’s kind of like they’re on the plane,” says Alex Pozzi, vice president of research and development at the company’s campus.
Over the years, seat researchers at B/ E Aerospace, which Rockwell acquired in April for US$8 billion, have gleaned a few insights about life in the air.
Most people are just fine for two hours. As the third hour approaches, stiffness increases and comfort declines. At four hours, however, a sort of derierre detente is achieved, and the levels of discomfort recede. After all, when you’re stuck inside a sealed, speeding tube at 35,000 feet, resistance is truly futile.
There are many reasons to despise flying, from delays, to fees, to overzealous security staff. But shrinking seats and the pain, claustrophobia and rage they can trigger are arguably the biggest justification for airline loathing.
The modern seat, with its power to pack more customers onto any given plane, is at the very heart of the industry’s 21st Century economics. Slimmer seats and less legroom between rows — known as pitch — has enabled “cabin densification” across domestic and international fleets. More seats, quite simply, mean more money and lower operating costs.
There are limits, however, even beyond physical constraints. Regulators mandate a certain ratio of attendants to seats, and airlines want to keep labour costs down. Still, the trend has clearly been towards scrunching you. While 86.4 to 89cm of pitch was once common for economy class, the new normal is 76.2 to 78.7cm, with several major US carriers deploying 71.1cm on short and medium flights. Soon, however, that squeeze-play may come to an end.
The seat factory in North Carolina is at the centre of testing the physical limits of human tolerance. One part of its live studies involves giving only some participants Wi-Fi access, an exercise that typically reveals a direct relationship between distraction and seat-staying power. “You can easily see the difference in ratings for the exact same seat if you have entertainment,” says Pozzi.
Yes, a good sci-fi flick can ease posterior pain, so it’s no coincidence that most seatbacks on long-haul flights have a screen. But this is small compensation for the sacrifices required of air travellers who, having run the gauntlet of parking, ticketing and security, visibly slump when they find that their assigned seat has shrunk even further.
Reallocation of aircraft real estate has allowed airlines to install new, medium-tier cabins between first class and economy. The front of the plane where the big money sits remains largely unchanged when it comes to space. The shrinkage, unsurprisingly, has been in the back.
In recent years, the “slimline” seat has become the de facto standard by which airlines outfit economy cabins. This design is much thinner than predecessors and markedly lighter, giving airlines an additional cost saving by reducing weight and thus fuel burn. Today, an economy seat that tips the scales above 9kg is, by an airline’s measure, too heavy to fly.
Airlines are “segmenting the economy cabin into two or three buckets,” says John Heimlich, chief economist at Airlines for America, the industry’s US trade group. These efforts help “to minimise the market-share loss to ultra low-cost carriers or to other modes of transport.”
When Boeing introduced the twinaisle 777 in the mid-1990s, a nine-seat breadth was standard. Now, the aircraft — flown by carriers worldwide — often seats 10 across in economy, making life even more miserable for passengers. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has become notorious for its economyclass pinch with nine-across seating — and on some 787s, these seats are only 43.2cm wide. (Airbus’ new A350 is also typically configured with nine seats across, but its cabin is about 1.2m wider.)
This cabin squeeze and seat shrinking has helped increase earnings in an industry that has become used to fiscal stability. But it occasionally results in some bad public relations.
Two United passengers got into a kerfuffle in 2014 when a man stuck a “knee defender” device on the seat in front of him to prevent reclining, angering the seat’s occupant. The crew diverted the Denver-bound flight to Chicago to eject both combatants.
In early May, news leaked that the world’s largest airline, American Airlines, planned to add three rows of seats separated by only 73.7cm of pitch on its new fleet of Boeing 737 Max aircraft, which arrive this year.
That arrangement would allow for an additional row of extra-legroom seats, which American calls “main cabin extra”, between first class and steerage. The move would have broken the current 76.2cm pitch limit among the six biggest US airlines, putting it closer to no-frills carriers such as Spirit Airlines, which offers a mere 71.1cm.
Less than six weeks later, American reversed course — not because of passenger outrage, but because of flight attendants. American chief executive Doug Parker said employees pushed back at having to be the front-line defender of a new level of cabin-class stratification. Parker said employees were telling him, “‘You're going to put us in a position where we need to explain to these customers that indeed this is necessary so that we can have one more row of main cabin extra?"
Parker explained: "While we could convince ourselves that might be able to produce somewhat higher revenues on the aircraft, what it was doing to our perception with our team wasn’t worth it.”
No airline has yet edged below 71.1cm of legroom, a thought at least one major seat manufacturer, Zodiac Aerospace, has shown a with just 68.6cm.
Italy-based Aviointeriors gained attention in 2010 with a "standing" perch-style concept called SkyRider. That “seat” hasn’t passed regulatory muster, nor won any orders, although periodically an ultra low-cost carrier will speak favourably about such seating possibilities. Last month, South American airline VivaColombia was
the latest to raise the prospect of standing flights.
This rush to squeeze ever more money out of passenger posture may soon slow. Carriers such as Delta Air Lines are looking to exploit this issue by retaining some creature comforts its competitors have ditched. It has kept nine-across seating on its 777s, “one of the only in the world” to do so, says Joe Kiely, Delta’s managing director of product and customer experience.
JetBlue Airways took pitch into consideration for its Airbus A320 fleet, which will see legroom shrink by more than 2.5cm, to 81.3cm, starting this autumn. Despite the contraction, JetBlue still wanted to be able to advertise “the most legroom in coach.”
Meanwhile in Europe, low-fare king Ryanair Holdings will pitch the 197 seats on its new 737 Max at 78.7cm — more than American, which plans for 76.2cm of legroom in a slightly smaller version of the new 737 it begins flying in November. The battle over comfort — or more accurately, less discomfort — is on.
Smaller seats and legroom have come in for scrutiny by a powerful US federal appeals court. A three-judge panel recently ruled that regulators must consider setting minimum space standards, agreeing with aspects of a consumer group lawsuit that warned safety is being compromised. In emergencies, the Federal Aviation Administration requires fully loaded planes be emptied in 90 seconds or less.
“This is the Case of the Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat,” US Circuit Judge Patricia Ann Millett wrote in the July 28 ruling. Her court, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, handles most cases involving federal regulators and rules, a fact that may give airlines pause as they decide whether to shrink seating further.
Flyers Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group, contends that seat space has shrunk at the same time passengers have grown larger. Those developments could lead to a catastrophic outcome during evacuation, it warns.
The group also points to a less dramatic peril exacerbated by tight quarters and longer flights: deep-vein thrombosis, or blood clots in the leg, which can kill.
“Our concern is that it will take a Titanic-type disaster to make a change if we don’t get regulation,” says Paul Hudson, the group’s president. The court decision may “give impetus to getting seats back to where they’re going to be both safe and potentially not unhealthy.”
Bills pending in both houses of Congress would mandate rules on minimum airline seat space. In the past, such efforts have failed; the US Department of Transportation has likewise been reluctant to address the topic. Airlines frequently say that such regulatory moves targeting key revenue centres — baggage fees, seat space, ticket-change fees — could lead to higher fares.
Hudson, who previously worked as an aviation lawyer, dismissed the industry response as a knee-jerk reaction. “I’ve never heard that argument not raised,” he says.
Airlines offer a few other rejoinders to the chorus of complaints. One is airfare: faced with a choice between discomfort and higher fares, an overwhelming majority of travellers choose the former.
Another response is pricing power. While industry consolidation did allow carriers to cut costs and command higher prices on some routes, average US airfares have been one of the few consistent goods to hold firm against inflation over the past 20 years. Slimming the seats and tightening the space, the airlines argue, is a rational response.
The industry also points out that new seats, while thinner, are far superior to older models. Carriers’ zeal for lighter, durable, ergonomic seating has yielded engineering advances. Body shape and size, along with better materials and design, have become integral to airline seat manufacturing, and all four of the industry’s major players — Recaro, Thompson Aero Seating, Zodiac Aerospace and Rockwell Collins — are fiercely competitive in such areas as materials and ergonomics.
The L-shaped seat of yore has morphed into something more akin to a pivoting cradle- chair, seat designers say. And the once-flat seat pan, the chair’s frame and source of much anguish, is now generally curved. The passenger’s lower back is also finding fresh support in the newer designs.
American noted repeatedly that its seat selection for the 737 Max is a newer Rockwell Collins design, called Meridian, that is more comfortable than prior economy-class seats. That’s the same seat Southwest Airlines chose for its 200 new Max aircraft and its current 737-800s. United Continental is also purchasing the Meridian seat for its Max 9.
During a tour of its North Carolina design complex in May, Rockwell Collins officials invited reporters to sit in a variety of newer seats, including the Meridian and Aspire, a model aimed at two-aisle aircraft on long-haul routes.
Tom Plant, vice president and general manager of aircraft seating at the company’s Interior Systems unit, asked the “passengers” to guess how much legroom each seat had. The pitch was 73.7cm, but all the guesses were too high.
Designers had managed to create a clever illusion of space. And that illusion means money.
Faced with a choice between discomfort and higher fares, an overwhelming majority of travellers choose the former