Flying is awful: Redesign airplanes
At Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar, airline passengers can go swimming. In Denver’s airport, you’ll find three rooftop decks with firepits. Airports now offer vending machines with fine cheeses and cupcakes, cultural gardens − there’s a lagoon stocked with koi at Honolulu’s airport − yoga lessons, golf simulators. It’s part of a new trend in airport design.
Make airports as lovely as you like. If they still lead to airplanes, then we still have a problem.
Because flying in America is pure hell.
And that would be true even if there were never another delay or cancellation. It’s the airplane, stupid. It’s barely changed since the 1970s except in two important ways: The seats have gotten smaller, and legroom has shrunk by 20%.
Smaller seats, larger travelers
Here are the numbers: Seats have gone from 18 inches to 16, and the distance between seat backs now averages 28 inches, down from 35 inches in 1970. Meanwhile, passengers on average pack on nearly 30 extra pounds in body weight and gained an inch in height since the 1960s.
Think about how absurd this is for a moment. In 50 years, we can’t improve the seats in airplanes. We can only make them worse?
By contrast, look what’s happened with the seats in our cars. The seats in my mother’s 1972 Chevy Nova were about as comfortable as old-school mesh lawn chairs. Today, even mid-priced cars come with seats as plush as La-Z-Boys, outfitted with heaters and myriad lumbar adjustments.
You want a little extra legroom on your next domestic flight? You can pay extra for Comfort Plus, which sounds like an adult diaper brand, and, get this, you’ll get an extra 3 inches. That’s half the length of a dollar bill, and you’re still being shorted 4 inches from the standard legroom you had in 1970.
We gave the airlines $25 billion during the pandemic and they gave us Comfort Plus?
Now let’s get out of our crappy little seat and take a look around the rest of the plane: a sea of beige plastic, low ceilings, crammed aisles that even the miniaturized food cart can barely navigate, awkward overhead compartments, poor lighting. And that little air nozzle thingie above your seat? I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been redesigned since Richard Nixon was in the White House.
Seems it would be a lot easier − and less expensive − to redesign the airplane than to reinvent the airport. Which, by the way, is not meant to be a destination.
Here are a few thoughts: Raise the ceilings, and add skylights down the aisle.
That might help alleviate the feeling that you’ve been closed alive into a coffin.
How about inflight virtual reality?
And how about experimenting with new colors? Beige is so ... beige. And instead of those dinky little earbuds, how about a virtual reality set so I can imagine I’m anywhere else but in a tin box in the sky?
Here’s a really easy one: Dig out the blueprints from a 1970s Boeing 747 and follow the seating specs. Then you can get back to working on making the exit doors stay attached for the entire flight.