Disclose airline seat sizes to the sardines, er, fliers
With jetliners filled to capacity over the summer, air travel usually involves being squished into a narrow seat with scant legroom, so the airlines can cram more fliers onto each plane, sell more tickets and make more money. Meanwhile, you’re packed in like a sardine.
Things have gotten so bad that it made news in June when American Airlines decided to cut seat pitch, a proxy for legroom, by only 1 inch on its new Boeing 737 MAX jets rather than by 2 inches, as originally planned. Talk about being thankful for small favors.
Before airlines were deregulated in 1978, seats were wider and offered more legroom. But in recent years, average seat pitch in coach has narrowed from about 35 inches to 31. On some discount carriers, such as Spirit and Frontier, pitch is as low as 28 inches. Average seat width has shrunk from 18 inches to 17 or less.
If that’s not bad enough, the seat shrinkage has occurred while Americans have grown larger. An average woman who weighed 140 pounds in 1960 weighed 166 pounds in 2010; the average man went from 166 to 195 pounds.
Seat size is usually viewed as a comfort issue, but is it also a safety concern? Flyers Rights, a passenger advocacy group, thinks so. It has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate size, arguing that the smaller, crammed-in seats impede evacuations.
The FAA has blown off the argument, but last month a federal appeals court in Washington blasted the agency for cavalierly dismissing the group’s “plausible life-and-death safety concern.”
Judge Patricia Millett wrote that the agency used outdated evacuation tests that failed to take into account smaller seats and larger passengers. Where the FAA claimed tests showed successful evacuations, the agency kept them secret. Under FAA rules, an aircraft with more than 44 seats must be able to be evacuated in 90 seconds.
It’s “basic physics,” Millett wrote, that at some point bigger passengers and smaller seats would “impede the ability of passengers to extricate themselves from their seats” during an emergency. Essentially, the court ordered the agency to provide better public documentation that smaller seats are safe.
If it turns out crammed seats impede evacuations, or pose a health threat, regulation would be needed. Even now, with so much passenger discontent, airlines should be required to clearly post the width and pitch of seats so customers have that data when they shop for tickets online.
Sure, passengers can find this information on separate sites such as SeatGuru. Or they can hunt around, for example, on United’s website to find a seating chart with the data. But this takes time and expertise that shouldn’t be required to spend money on a plane ticket.
Airlines have long insisted that when it comes to seat sizes, customers have choices about what they value and are willing to pay for. But customers can’t decide whether to pay their way out of pain unless they have the necessary information.
If airlines want to keep treating passengers like sardines, the sardines at least ought to know just how small their accommodations will be.