Fliers grow, seats shrink and FAA drags its feet
Passengers boarding jetliners these days must envy sardines. At least the little fish get some oil before being stuffed into their tins. No such luck for beleaguered fliers.
As any frequent, or even infrequent, flier can attest, in recent years average seat “pitch” — a proxy for legroom — has shrunk, along with the width of individual seats. Average 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 inches or less.
That would be bad enough if passengers had remained the same size. They haven’t. The average woman went from
140 pounds in 1960 to 169 by 2014, according to the most recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The average man went from 166 pounds to 196.
Something’s got to give, and so far it’s not seat sizes.
JetBlue, known for its more comfortable seat pitches, 34 inches in economy, cut that space to 32 inches in its retrofitted A320 aircraft, to be rolled out this year. American Airlines cut pitch on several rows at the back of the cabin in its new Boeing 737 MAX jets by an inch. American CEO Doug Parker told USA TODAY that “a 30-inch pitch with these new technology seats feels exactly like the existing 31-inch pitch."
While seat size is usually thought of as a comfort issue, passenger advocacy groups such as Flyers Rights and Travelers United have raised health and safety concerns. Flyers Rights has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate, arguing logically enough that the smaller seats can impede evacuation. Under FAA rules, an aircraft with more than 44 seats must be able to be evacuated in 90 seconds.
Sometimes, it seems that it takes that long for a passenger in the window seat to squeeze by two seatmates for a bathroom break.
The FAA blew off the safety argument in 2016. But last July, a federal appeals court in Washington blasted the agency for dismissing concerns and for using outdated tests that failed to take into account the shrinking seats and growing passengers.
While the agency claimed that tests showed successful evacuations even with smaller seats, it refused to show the court any evidence of that testing. Judge Patricia Millett ordered the agency to document publicly its contention that safety wasn’t impeded.
More than seven months later — nothing. “We are preparing our response to the court,” an FAA spokesman said last week. That’s a long time to come up with data the agency claims it already has.
If small seats are shown to pose a safety or health danger, governmentmandated minimums would be appropriate. At the very least, Congress ought to require airlines to make it easier for fliers to find out — before they buy a ticket — just how squeezed they’ll be.
The industry’s pay-your-way-outof-pain model can work only for so long. The sardines, otherwise known as customers, are getting restless.