So this seat has the same poor legroom as others while being much lower, continues to share armrests (but now they're thinner/less useful), and in exchange you get a couple of inches of width to compensate in the middle row (while armrests are thinner in all three rows)? Plus the uneven rows make it that much harder to exit/pee from the window seat.
Their whole "the passengers will share a single armrest!" idea completely ignores how people work with regards to personal space (plus they installed their annoying "dual height" armrest in rows that don't share armrests, effectively cutting the armrest's length in half for no value at all).
Most planes I fly on, the middle seat is not wide enough for them to do anything else. Three full-sized males sitting next to each other will be physically touching shoulders.
Whoever takes the armrest first gets priority. It may cause your lifetime happiness to have a little more volatility but since everyone has the same random chance of getting the middle seat, still fair.
Your chances of getting the middle seat go up as the other seats are taken, meaning that a lot of the people in the middle seats are people who had to book that ticket on short notice: death in the family, emergency business trip, other flight got canceled, etc.
The airline's already got "being crappy to the person who's having a crappy day" covered. Don't be the human embodiment of an airline.
Go buy a plane ticket right now. Don't even need a credit card to get to "choose a seat" and you will see, all the aisle and window seats are taken by default.
You have to pay extra to not get a middle seat.
It's actually a bit annoying to have to explain this to you based on your childish reply.
I think it depends on the airline. Most of the budget European airlines I fly with will allocate you a middle-seat by default if one is available when you choose the free "give me a random seat" option at check-in. I presume this is to give away their paid seat inventory as slowly as possible, and also because by giving the passenger the worst available seat you get more value from paying to choose your own seat. Of course: they have a limited number of middle seats to give out so I've found that a good strategy is to check-in five minutes before the online check-in cutoff time which usually yields window/aisle seats and frequently (~30%) exit-row seats.
I prefer window, and I get window basically every time.
Airline "Southwest" allocates most seats based on when you click "check in". If you check in earlier, your boarding position is closer to first, and your chance of getting a desired seat goes way up. You can pay extra to board earlier ("Early bird") for $15. They don't have classes (there is no "first class" or business or coach) but you can pay for other features like cash-refundable tickets or boarding first.
Airline "Delta" simply lets you book your seat, so if you buy reasonable early, you can book a desired seat.
For other airlines, if the cost to upgrade to a window seat is on the order of $10-15, then I do it.
So I think your experience is limited to a small number of airlines, and your description of the OP as "childish" is poor.
Southwest Airlines early check in is $35 at ticket purchase time or $40 at the gate. When flying with my family that’s an extra $200. I like southwest but this is one thing I really dislike about them.
In fact, Frontier charges more for the middle seat. I assume this is because middle-seaters are likely to be a couple/family wanting to sit together and forced to pay the premium. No solo traveler would willingly purchase a middle seat, so you don't need to optimize for pricing the middle seats for them.
Seems this wouldn’t work very well. Pick the aisle and window; middle will always trade IME. If you need three across, book aisle, window, and a nearby aisle and you again have tradable seats.
I’ve seen this a lot more over the last few years with US carriers. The bottom tier ticket doesn’t let you choose and you have to pay more to get a choice (aisle or window).
It definitely used to be more of a first-book-first-choice policy but now they’re using it as another upsell.
To whomever can take AND hold the armrest go the spoils of victory. What care I for plaintive cries of "fairness" when nature provided me the means to take the armrest I deserve from less capable arms?
I bet you get a lot of crotch in the face for your actions. Hot, seething, sweaty crotch from every person in the middle seat. The reason people choose civility is that eventually everyone benefits. Lack of civility immediately makes it worse for everyone. People in planes are already miserable, no reason to make it worse unless you enjoy causing others misery, which says more about you than anyone else.
What do you really want and expect here? They're not going to find extra space out of nowhere, are they? Yes they're just juggling things around. If you don't want to pay any more, there's a limit to what they can do. If you do want to pay more you can already do that! Some flights have four tiers of seating you can pick from depending on what you want and what your budget is.
In 2018, Air France more than doubled its profit, to 409 million a year. Paying more only gets you so much with these huge airlines. They don't reinvest everything you give them. Their goal is mostly to make more profit or increase share value, especially if publicly traded.
Profit in isolation is a meaningless metric in this context. In 2018, Air France KLM carried over 100 million passengers. So the profit is just 4 euro per passenger. That means very small changes in costs per seat can quickly move the company from the black to the red.
Also, with full service airlines, business class is by far the most profitable use of their square footage. Cheap economy flights are really an extraordinary thing, but they’re never going to be the height of comfort. Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.
>Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.
Sounds like you've never flown on an Asian airline. I flew on Singapore Airlines a few months ago and economy there was like first-class on an American airline, but with smaller seats.
It’s probably the airline I’ve flown on the most. The flight attendants are nice, and you get a little ammenities bag. But none of that changes the fact that you’re packed into an economy class seat for x hours. The food is honestly not any better that other full service airlines either.
Honestly, I have no idea where you’re getting this from. There’s certainly economy classes out there worse than SG, but to compare it to any first class experience is complete nonsense.
Anyway, I'm talking about the level of service and comfort: great meals, blankets, pillows, beautiful and friendly flight attendants, hot handtowels, free wine/beer, even some warm socks for wearing to the bathroom, are all standard in economy class. Several of these are probably not even available in First Class on American carriers, such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol.
"Complimentary house beer and wines, soft drinks, juices, tea and freshly brewed illy coffee"
That's in economy.
> It doesn't exist on US planes, because it's an Asian custom. It's a hot, wet towel that they hand out to everyone before every meal so you can wipe your hands.
Yes, hot wet towels. You get them before meals on US carriers as well. Here's a video of them being handed out in economy on a domestic US flight.
You're moving the goal posts. Why are you now saying you're only talking about domestic? You didn't say that before.
> Why are you trying so hard to defend American carriers anyway?
Just resisting your aggressive denial of what I know to be true and accusations that I'm lying (about hot towels, for some reason)! I don't know what parallel universe you're living in but I know what I've seen.
I'm not moving the goal posts. I've never seen free alcohol on domestic flights, and I don't see why I should restrict comparisons with international airlines to international flights with domestic carriers. A flight is a flight.
As for hot towels, you'll have to do a lot better than a Youtube video with quizzical comments because apparently none of those people have ever seen it either. In fact, if it were so common, why would someone bother to post a short Youtube video of this? Obviously, given the focus of the short video and its title, the fact that they're handing out these towels is new and novel. And as I've said, I've flown domestically countless times, since the 1980s, and I've never seen this, ever. They would almost certainly do it for flights to/from Asia because it's normal there, but Americans aren't used to hot towels. After all, they never serve them in restaurants either.
I can understand your fellow debater getting frustrated here. Whilst at times you each seemed to be confused about what the other is asserting (i.e., international flights vs domestic flights), at other times you are asserting things that are generally known to be incorrect.
Complementary alcohol - as a standard offering - is not normally offered to basic economy passengers on domestic flights in the U.S., and hasn't been for at least a couple of decades.
That said, some airlines offer it as a promotion on some flights [1], which may be why you have experienced it. But it's not a norm that any coach passenger could expect on any domestic flight, the way it used to be in the earlier days of commercial air travel.
The video you shared of hot towels being handed out in economy on a domestic U.S. flight was a one-off promotional event. It's also not the norm.
Like I said, I get that the two of you were talking about different things and were sometimes confused about what the other was talking about. But you did inflame things by asserting/suggesting things that aren't really the case.
I think the subtext is that flights aren't supposed to cost what cheap economy flights cost; they should be substantially more expensive. So you can "unaccept" the discomfort by paying for them what they should cost.
I can get a seat on a flight that will take me to the opposite side of the world in less than a day for ~$600. That’s not unacceptable, that’s amazing. Cheap and fast international travel has to be somewhere on the list of most revolutionary post-industrialisation innovations.
There are plenty of carriers (some might even say all of them) today without standing places where you don’t have to pay for using the toilets and many of them are profitable. You don’t need to accept ridiculous things for that. It’s just that every time, one of them will try to squeeze just a few more cents out of you and if the public allows them to do that, all the others will jump at the opportunity.
People can fly on different airlines. I used to treat myself to cityjet now and then for a nicer experience when flying DUB->LCY. But usually I took Ryanair, because I valued saving ~100 EUR more than a somewhat more pleasant flight and less time in transit.
There are plenty of businesses whose goal is not mainly profit, but selling a good product/service. RSE and environmental issues are more and more important to businesses. Paying good salaries should come next. Profit for people already rich enough to invest should come last. That's the only way to get sustainable growth and a healthy society.
I believe deeply that we need a profound, fundamental reorganization of our economy and culture to avoid apocalyptic climate breakdown and social collapse.
But, right now, starting a business with goals that aren't profitability leaves you vulnerable to somebody else who _will_ maximize profitability.
In your own life, even, trying to do things that don't maximize profit (taking more holiday, etc.) leaves you vulnerable to competition from other workers who will do that.
We need to design systems where maximizing profit (something humans have been trying to do forever) produces behaviours we desire, like treating the planet and other people better. But blaming a single business working within the constraints they find themselves in is unlikely to help.
For example, the lesson of Union Carbide is that it's OK to murder tens of thousands of people through incompetence and willful negligence. Other companies that spent more on safety were effectively punished for doing so, since of course they would have to spend more. This is why we still had Hydrofluoric Acid a risk of killing thousands and thousands of Philadelphians as recently as a few weeks ago.
I found that the cost of transit subtracted substantially from the benefit of Ryanair. They tend to fly from out-of-the-way airports, requiring an additional transportation link. It wasn't very expensive, nor are other airports exactly downtown, either. But between the money and the time, it shifted me away from Ryanair on some legs.
Yeah, the train ticket from Stansted to London was more than the flight a lot of the time. I ended up going between them depending on circumstances. If I was booking late (couple days' notice) Cityjet was almost always competitive.
"A couple of inches" is seating gold. Although I'm 6'1' I've got relatively short legs and legroom isn't much of a problem, but I have broad shoulders even for my height. That means that if I'm in a narrow middle seat I'm spilling over into the adjoining seats, and there's nothing I can do about it. This is why I try to avoid Boeings - they tend to have narrower seats as a rule.
Seat width is something people should be talking about as much as seat pitch.
Totally. Places screw around with width a lot too. I did a tour of MLB ballparks this spring and was surprised at the width variance between parks and even sections in parks.
Lowering the seat will also make it quite a bit worse for people with long legs. The height of the usual seats is already too low. It would be better if they raised the middle seat instead but I guess that adds cost/weight.
Raising the seat on a small single-aisle plane might have your head bumping into the overhead if you're tall.
It'd be nice if the seat height were adjustable, but that would just result in the seats breaking down more often I think. I have long legs, but not that long a torso for my height, so a slightly elevated seat would be nice for me, but other tall men might be miserable.
This configuration probably wins them 2 seats or something.
I doubt it has anything to do passenger comfort; else as you said they would have addressed the armrests issue.
I dream of the day that like fat people can have two chairs next to each other, tall people can have the chair in front of them removed for leg space. :+)
This works nicely until the guy in the window seat gets up to pee. He runs into, or tugs on, the seat back that is in his way as he tries to exit the row, annoying the occupant of that seat.
Once as he leaves and once as he returns. I'll take it over being smushed. What drives me batshit is when there's a kid in the seat behind me who uses my seat back as a punching bag and just goes all out on it with hands and feet.
I have always felt the same way. Flying with other people's children is infuriating. (So is dining with other people's children, or taking public transit with other people's children. Or a car-share pool with other people's children...)
Conclusion: Sharing an environment with other people's children statistically sucks. We may win some victories here and there with tact, diplomacy, and/or luck, but that's the reality.
And I am especially sensitive to this, as when I fly to Europe and am stuck in this cacophony for six to eight hours, I usually have a presentation or essay I'm working on and could really use a distraction-free environment.
So I'm both irritated and feeling stressed that I can't work effectively. This is suboptimal personally and professionally. So what are my options?
I chose to fly economy. I could have gotten rich and bought my own plane, but no. I could have spent money flying first class (which filters a LOT of families out). But no. I chose to fly economy, where the price of my ticket was low PRECISELY because families are also flying economy, subsidizing my ticket.
If an airline offered an "Absolutely no kids allowed" flight for anything except a vacation charter, the seats would be more expensive. So instead, they offer first class, and "comfort economy," and if I want a seat not subsidized by unruly toddlers and crying infants, that's what I purchase.
It's harsh, but the universe is no more "fair" to me than it is to people who want affordable housing in San Francisco.
When you live in a balanced society that frequently exposes you to interactions with kids, you don't get annoyed by their chaos. I can't feel sorry for anyone that isolates himself/herself from this part of normal life and then gets annoyed.
I'm actually not that annoyed by kids doing age-appropriate things. I have a couple myself, and I was a child once-upon-a-time.
If I need to be comfortable, I upgrade to comfort economy. If I need to save money, I think about my cost saving and remind myself that these children (in Canada, at least) will grow up to pay for my health care.
The last thing I need is them growing up to think that old people are irritable and annoying to them!
Sounds like your best option is to stop procrastinating so badly that you have to get work done in one of the least work-friendly environments out there.
you've got a choice in the matter. other people's children can be wonderful travel companions who distract you from the drudgery of your economy seat existence. or you can wallow in your own annoyance and inability to focus on something else. happiness and contentment come from changing perspectives, moreso than changing circumstances or other people.
i (try to) remind myself of this when i get annoyed with other people on both roads and walkways.
It depends on the child. If they're well-behaved children, then yeah, they can be very nice to sit next to. After all, you don't have to worry about them taking up much seat space.
If they're American kids, on the other hand, prepare for hours of sheer misery as they have zero discipline and their parents refuse to curtail their horrible behavior.
Noise isolating headphones, not noise cancelling, are the trick. Throw on some white noise and a screaming toddler one aisle back won’t even register. I’m a fan of the Shure’s (although their lightning cable sucks and their bluetooth option isn’t much better, and the microphone isn’t what it should be from company that specializes in microphones)
Even on long flights without children it's hard to imagine them as being relaxing/productive hours.
My personal bug-bear is neighbours spilling over my seat. Having wider seats would help but some people really do need to be using two seats not just one.
The offset seats also look like they create extra gaps for kids to poke their hands through and annoy people in front. Or if you're really unlucky, someone's gross feet.
If your feet enter my space they become my property to do with as I please. In fact if anything enters my space unannounced I assume it's a gift from the flying gods and act appropriately. This includes people reclining their heads into my face. My heavily breathing onto your face while I stare at you sleeping because you jammed your seat into my knees is just rewards. It helps not being afraid of breaking social niceties in order to enforce them on others who can't be bothered to do them. In the same token poor new parents with screaming babies get my sympathy. It's hard enough trying to coo your child while feeling horrible about messing with everyone around because your family lives somewhere else. Adults and children old enough to know better... That's another story.
Certain ages and conditions of children make that irrelevant. Try getting a three year old to stop anything--you'll trade being a punching bag for deafness from shrieks and whining--or an autistic child to even be aware that he is doing it.
It's rare that one knows more about how to handle children than their caregivers, and "reminders" from strangers are often wrong, besides being insulting.
2-3 year olds probably don't have the arm-length to really reach too far forward. Older than that I'd hope they could be restrained - although not physically!
It's impossible to force some children to be quiet. If I were the parent of my mildly autistic son I would answer that he is autistic and mute and that it's useless.
Most people would understand this rare exception, but it is very rare. I've seen (and felt) lots of seats being kicked, and never once was the guilty child autistic.
It's not a rare exception, it is only one of the possible motives of kicking seats. Suck it up or try to find an agreement with the person behind you. Talk directly with the child.
I'd love to live in a world in which strangers on an airplane would welcome my chastisement of their unruly children. I don't live in that world, however. Your family situation certainly inspires my sympathy, but do you really want people to assume that all misbehaving children are probably autistic? That's not a good stereotype to foster.
You really can speak with children who aren't yours. Some parents will probably be upset or offended no matter how you approach, well tough luck for them. I think most parents will be shamed as an initial response but the key is your delivery. Don't be a jerk of adult. The child likely does not understand the consequences of kicking on a seat. Explain to the child that you can feel it and that it bothers or hurts you, it may make more impact than routing feedback through the parents.
It may not work. It may take some reiteration. The parents may politely explain a learning disability in which you just engage with them. The parents may give you a stinkeye. Oh well, kids need to learn how to interact with the rest of their world, and the parents who you seem to be most worried about are probably the ones whose kids need it the most.
Usually I find that parents are reasonable and appreciate other adults treating their children like small, learning humans rather than tiny monsters.
I don't care about the proper socialization of some random kid on a plane. That is not my job. That is a parent's job. As others have indicated, parents probably have a better understanding of the kid's special problems than I do. The point is not that we're going to solve this problem, of kids being unruly and parents saving their efforts for other priorities. If I didn't pay for first class, I can tolerate a couple hours of annoyance.
The point was a far smaller one, that writing off poor public behavior as "well, autism is increasingly common now" is a pathetic cop-out, which does no favors for those who are actually autistic.
Children from countries other than America exhibit poor behavior. That's what children do, because they lack the structures and connections in their brains that adults have that provide us the ability to comport ourselves the way we do.
They aren't as bad as American children, because in other cultures they're taught from an early age how to behave appropriately around other people. In America, parents think their kids are special snowflakes and should never be disciplined, so bad behavior is rampant. The culture in America really is different from other places, as much as you might refuse to believe this.
As for "structures and connections", that's a ridiculous excuse. Sure, when children are infants you can make that excuse because they're really too young to learn almost anything. We're talking about kids that are 5-10 years old here. Differing upbringing doesn't somehow magically take effect only at age 18.
When I purchase an airline ticket, my arrangement is with the airline, not with their other passengers. They owe me nothing. It is not a public space. I can no more shush their children (or such-by-proxy) than I can call up another customer of my internet provider and ask them to use less bandwidth so that I get more.
I can ask the flight attendant to speak to the parents about the kid kicking the seat, but if the flight attendant declines to fix my problem, my ire is best directed at the airline declining to provide me with a comfortable environment.
They could institute a no-children rule, or a "your children must behave or you will be banned from flying our airline" rule, just as Hacker News chooses what kind of behaviour to moderate and what to allow. But the airlines openly tolerate this behaviour for their own reasons, and I choose to do business with them.
I strongly suspect that although they are tactful about it, what they would like to say if I complain is, "If you will just give me your credit card, Sir, I will upgrade your ticket to first class. Come this way, I will pour you a flute of champagne."
We celebrate naked capitalism at the expense of customers here. It turns out, airlines do as well.
I don’t think US carriers can legally institute a no-children rule — i think this sort of policy would constitute age discrimination [0]. Not sure about other localities. Removing particularly disruptive/belligerent passengers seems to be fair game, but really that’s exceptional and doesn’t apply to most of the interactions being discussed here.
I don’t think anyone in this thread is saying that travelers should be entitled to shush other people’s children, which would be incredibly rude. You’re perfectly entitled to go through the intermediary of the airline, but I think polite engagement along the lines of what GP suggested would be a positive feature of society.
They may not be able to, I certainly don't actually want them to. I'm fine with kids when I travel economy, and I'm fine with fewer distractions when I travel comfort economy.
TFA says this is for commuter flights. No passenger on such a flight should be urinating, but anyone who has a health problem or something should just request an aisle seat.
Most people can sit through a movie. It's no longer the case, but I've had jobs in which that sort of toilet activity would have been sharply criticized. I guess I was visualizing the sort of plane in which one can't stand up straight, although as observed elsewhere ITT those planes wouldn't have three seats together. Perhaps it would also be an improvement to stagger a two-seat row?
Maybe there are more expansive plans, but TFA literally says it is for commuter flights: "Designed for commuter flights of only a few hours max, the S1 moves the middle seat a few inches lower than, and back from, the aisle and window seat"
“A few hours” doesn’t match my understanding of “commuter flight” at all. A few hours can get you clear across the US, and is more than enough time for someone to need to dump ballast.
Oh I totally agree with every point you make. I'm incredibly cynical and pessimistic about the potential for these seats to improve any passenger's experience.
I was merely hoping to correct a possible misreading of the article's (literal) contents, which I see in retrospect makes me to inadvertently appear be the subject of xkcd 386 :)
It’s a weird situation: the article does indeed say it’s for commuter flights, but also immediately says it’s not. I guess you’re both right, or both wrong, depending on your preference.
This is the second article I've seen about this and neither has a picture of people actually sitting in the seats. All I want is before and after pictures with people in the seats.
My non-cynical guess is that with people in them, you can't visually see much of a difference. The same way way I can't really eyeball the difference an extra inch or two of legroom will make for me.
I'm 6'1" and all I want is like 2 more inches of knee room, like planes used to have, so that when the person in front of me drops their seat back it doesn't go right onto my knees. I have nowhere to go other than widening my stance and encroaching on the people on either side. The new ultra thin / no pading seats some airlines use really hurt when they land on your knees.
"[Average length has decreased from] 35 inches before airline deregulation in the 1970s to about 31 inches today. During the same period, the average width of seats declined from 18 to 16.5 inches..."
I fly in plenty of middle seats being a government employee. Nearly all of the window and aisle seats are booked by the time we schedule the trip, and we can't pay extra for premium economy. I'm an average size guy, 5'10, 170 lbs, and never have an issue sitting middle next to average weight people. On Southwest, I actually go for them first to get within the first couple rows and get off the plane quicker. I've never had someone fall asleep and rest their head on my shoulder as I've seen on TV. But I do have a small bout of anxiety as I'm walking down the aisle for the chance I have to sit next to an overweight person. You can't help but be touching hips the entire trip, and arm nudges quite often.
This solution poses a whole new set of issues already mentioned, but the real solution in my opinion is to relegate a few rows with only 2 seats for overweight people, priced accordingly. Public perception wouldn't allow requiring overweight people to book those seats, but I think a lot of overweight people would out of courtesy and their own comfort. They would be available to anyone who wanted the extra width as well, but you'd be less motivated to pay extra for it if you didn't need it.
> On Southwest, I actually go for them first to get within the first couple rows and get off the plane quicker. I've never had someone fall asleep and rest their head on my shoulder as I've seen on TV. But I do have a small bout of anxiety as I'm walking down the aisle for the chance I have to sit next to an overweight person.
I tend to do this for Southwest as well - If the plane is already fairly full, I'd prefer to pick my neighbors and take a middle seat rather than risking it further back in the plane.
> but the real solution in my opinion is to relegate a few rows with only 2 seats for overweight people, priced accordingly
Don't planes generally already have this? Most planes I have been on have the business class (or whatever it is called) seats at the front, with just two seats beside eachother, and then the rest of the plane being three seats. I guess it is not targeted at people who are overweight, but it is available.
>This solution poses a whole new set of issues already mentioned, but the real solution in my opinion is to relegate a few rows with only 2 seats for overweight people, priced accordingly.
That would be a barrier to access based on disability, and would open up an entire host of legal liabilities for the airlines. I have to assume that's why they haven't done it yet.
They already have something like this on Spirit called "the big seat". It's basically a domestic/no-frills first class seat in the front of the plane but you still need to pay your peanuts. I think it's a great idea and it makes flying Spirit more bearable.
This looks like the thing you do to park benches to stop homeless people from sleeping on them.
I fly with two little kids (and a tiny wife), any of which can lay across a row of three seats like a bed. If you can find a non-full international flight, that can make all the difference. Unless of course you have hobo spikes on the plane.
I find the armrests are the main problem - if you get two large or selfish pax on either side who both decide the middle armrest is theirs, you're left with no arm rest at all, or some kind of territorial fight. Fixing that would go a long way to equity.
In a way they already are "charging less" for the middle seat, in the form of paying money to select a seat. I think in the past 15 times I've flown I've always gotten the middle seat unless I pay to select a seat.
Not booking the seat is a bit of a crap-shoot. I've also had cases on budget airlines where leaving it up to chance got me in the front of the plane, or in an emergency exit row. I guess no one wanted to pay a premium for those seats, so they were the ones left for random assignment.
It still sucks; those changes do not make up for the discomfort. Better than nothing, i guess?
But how about addressing the issue economically/psychologically? Make the seat cheaper! People put up with discomfort happily if they think they made a good deal.
My last flight was Ryanair (a European budget airline). It was about $30 for the flight and $5 extra for choosing a seat. Effectively I got the flight 15% cheaper by accepting that I might get a middle seat.
The thing is, while you actually end up paying more for a window/aisle seat in the current system and my proposed one, it "feels" better to explicitly pay less for a middle seat. Humans are weird.
In your system, your airline would be at a disadvantage when customers are comparison shopping on OTAs, because your displayed price is "price for a window/aisle seat" and your competitors would be displaying "price for a middle seat".
Airlines will never adopt these seats en masse until people show a willingness to pay more for them. That isnt how airlines work - they are cargo companies, not customer service companies, and adding millions of dollars in expense so the cheapest customers feel better doesnt fit the model. People in the middle seat fly less often, are more price conscious, and generally dont matter to airlines because there is no loyalty by those customers.
>Airlines will never adopt these seats en masse until people show a willingness to pay more for them.
Why would people need to pay more for them? I see nothing here indicating these seats would actually cost the airline more. They don't actually take up any more space (they would take up a few extra inches, total, for the whole length of the plane, because of the offset, but that's not significant). These aren't some kind of fancy seats that cost a lot more to manufacture.
Of course they cost the airlines more. There are seats currently in the planes that do the trick just fine. Ripping them out and replacing them is indeed costly.
If the goal is to get these seats on NEW airplanes, well okay. But the refresh of a fleet takes a LONG time.
They buy new planes all the time though; Airbus is selling its planes as fast as it can build them. And airlines are constantly trying to get newer planes because they're more fuel-efficient, and the capital cost of the plane itself isn't that big a deal compared to how much money they'll spend on fuel while it's in service.
Also, airplane interiors probably get refreshed every so often anyway. Those seats are fabric, and with so many people sitting in them all the time wear out over time.
Not sure why you got down-voted, it's a fair question. My answer is that it's not something I've considered. I do a number of things that are "good" for the environment (recycling, composting, don't own a car, etc.) but I haven't ever even explored CO2 offsets. Just never occurred to me.
In fairness I think it's a fairly new thing for individuals (as opposed to large companies) to even be able to buy offsets, but I'm betting it will become a much larger trend quite quickly, perhaps even required in some jurisdictions. It's not a 'perfect' solution, but at least a step toward doing /something/ rather than shrugging off CO2 emissions as a merely inevitable consequence of air-travel.
For those of us with broad shoulders, being set back a few inches is going to turn me into a pretzel. Yes, I understand that with a “normal” seat, my shoulders violate my seat mates space. The only option I’ve found is to claim a window seat where my shoulder is aligned to the window cutout. As there’s no way to determine this arrangement with online booking tools, I prefer Southwest where my status allows me to always get that shoulder/window seat. And my company also doesn’t pay for seat upgrades, so I’m stuck gaming the reservation system to land a southwest flight.
You should try to get flights on Airbus planes instead, as they usually have wider seats. Southwest only flies 737s, which have terrible seat space because it's an ancient narrowbody design.
The solution I like most is flying on Embraer 170/190 aircraft for short (within Europe) trips, because they seat 2-2 instead of 3-3 like a 737. Also solves a big part of the carry-on luggage issues and boarding goes much faster.
Longer trips Air France has 1-2-1 seating on the 777 in business class, really like that for long flights alone for work. Enough to accept a 1 hour layover in Paris for it, because it means you can sleep all night on your way to Asia or on the way back from the US.
The exit row window seat on my flight yesterday was pretty tight left to right. At some point airlines shrank the buffer space between the window and window seat to zero, so there's no longer space for your arm on the window side. Squeezed between a full-sized adult on my right and the wall to my left was no way to spend four hours. tl;dr: Airlines need to stop shrinking the distance between seats on the same row.
Both. I want to go back to reasonable seat sizes even if costs go up because as it stands I'm choosing to fly less and less with the current seat pitch. In fact I did pay $100 out of pocket to upgrade my seat to economy plus and was lucky to snag a business row seat, or so I thought. It was in fact a miserably crowded experience.
The ticket prices back in the days of "reasonable seat sizes" were much more than your economy plus ticket cost. One of the big reasons flying is so affordable now is precisely because they can cram so many people in.
What a difference an inch makes! Southwest happily competes with United with very similar pricing yet they have 32-33" seat pitches with some jets using 31" vs United running 32-31" pitches with some seats now down to 30". Weirdly it looks like Jet Blue has even larger pitches, peaking at 34".
Since Jet Blue and Southwest are considered discount carriers vs United clearly pitch isn't exclusively about price. It's also about profit, particularly when Southwest also has wider seats than United.
Seriously I'm glad we had this discussion because despite living in Houston I think I'll by flying Southwest in preference to United from now on.
I'm not talking about Southwest vs. some other American carrier in 2019, I'm talking about American carriers in general in 2019 vs. American carriers in 1985. They had more room back then, but ticket prices were much more than they are now, after adjusting for inflation.
Maybe this new arrangement would make that phenomenon worse, but it already happens now, doesn't it? I've long thought that there should be a sort of grab bar hanging from the overhead locker, like you see on subways, to help people who have difficulty staying balanced while entering and exiting the row.
If you have ever flown economy, you will know that it's standard procedure for the middle and aisle seat to move to the aisle if the outer seats have to use the restroom.
Even with straight seating there's no way to exit (in economy) without vaulting over multiple people, and this assumes they aren't using tray tables.
Only chance this gets adopted in America (assuming it works as promised) is if airlines can upsell them as premium++ middle seats while cramming the premium+, premium, and sardine classes even further.
It looks like window and isle passengers will push their elbows right in the torso of middle passenger. But it is hard to judge without actually sitting in such seat.
I would kill for a standard middle seat compared to the middle seat I get stuck in sometimes on my hour long commuter train.
It's a three seater that comfortably fits two. Not only is it a tight for for three, but there are no arm rests, meaning you are squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder the whole time.
I've taken other trains (notably NYC) that don't seem to have this. Only the MBTA seems cursed with this layout. Wouldn't be a huge problem if the train wasn't standing room only (for at least a half hour) meaning people are squeezed as-is.
Metra trains in Chicago have the opposite problem. The standard 2x2 seats in the main floor are way too wide, leaving 8-12 inches between two chubby adults. This results in the aisles being too narrow and everyone getting clobbered with purses and backpacks as passengers move down the aisles.
Don’t get me started on the inane layouts of the upper levels of these cars (half forward and half sideways seats, guaranteeing each passenger getting on and off a crowded train car has to trip over 12 sets of legs).
The sad thing is that rail cars cost hundreds of thousands and are customized to each railway customer. A bit of cheap mock-up engineering before purchase could allow maybe 10% more passengers per car, and much faster and more pleasant loading and unloading.
Their whole "the passengers will share a single armrest!" idea completely ignores how people work with regards to personal space (plus they installed their annoying "dual height" armrest in rows that don't share armrests, effectively cutting the armrest's length in half for no value at all).