
Incredible shrinking airline seat - GordonS
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/29/incredible-shrinking-airline-seat-us-court-says-seat-size-a-safety-issue
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ilyanep
I'm generally all for government regulations, especially when the market is
such that true competition isn't really possible, but here I have to entirely
blame the consumer.

There are more than sufficient airlines on major routes for competition (and
you can see this when they get into fare sales for stuff like LAX-ORD for
$50). Consumers could be flying airlines like Southwest and Virgin. The fact
that they instead choose to fly on airlines like Frontier and Spirit shows
that they don't actually care to spend the extra money to have reasonable
seats or service.

I especially have to scoff at tech workers, who don't lack the money to make
their travel experience more pleasant, but still take redeyes to save money
and then complain about how much they hate travelling.

I feel like the people who are fighting for regulations on seat sizes don't
understand that those regulations will cause ticket prices to go up. If you're
fine with paying extra for a bigger seat, that's cool, but you can also
already do that today (Economy Plus or First) without any political fighting.
All you'll be doing is removing access to flying for the poorest people.

As for the safety issue, I'm no expert and I haven't seen the original
complaint, but the FAA already has a regulation about the maximum time it can
take to evacuate a plane (and therefore a limit on the number of seats per
door on the plane, effectively). This hits the airlines with no first class
cabin hardest, as they actually can't pack the entire 737 full of their
standard economy seat.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Consumers could be flying airlines like Southwest and Virgin. The fact that
> they instead choose to fly on airlines like Frontier and Spirit shows that
> they don't actually care to spend the extra money to have reasonable seats
> or service.

Virgin is quite good; Southwest is _terrible_. They're known for cost, not for
service. Their lack of assigned seating is one of many manifestations of that,
and it's the primary reason I never fly Southwest.

~~~
ilyanep
In my experience, if you don't travel enough to have status, Southwest is one
of the better companies for not being treated like a pleb and getting nickel
and dimed at every turn. Furthermore, many people find no assigned seats to be
a plus.

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zaroth
Regulations can be used appropriately to stop a race to the bottom, and I
think airline seats are a good example.

When credit card companies started tweaking terms and conditions to make their
cards more and more hostile to consumers, it's hard to be the company that
still offers the "right" terms (e.g. Payments above the minimum apply to the
highest interest balances first) when most consumers don't even understand
what I just wrote.

Similar with airline shopping, seat pitch just isn't visible enough, and even
if it was right there next to the price, do most shoppers understand what 28"
pitch really means?

A perfectly functioning free market relies on perfect information available to
the consumer. Today, we get a price and (usually) a brand name and that's
about it. So competition is almost entirely on price.

In cases like these, it benefits everyone to make some regulations setting
reasonable ground rules. Freeing airlines from having to compete against 28"
seat pitch is like freeing credit card companies from having to compete
against predatory terms and conditions.

Yes of course this has an impact on the bottom line. It would marginally
increase the cost of tickets the same way the CARD Act made it less profitable
to issue cards to certain people, and the same way airbags make cars more
expensive.

There are other practices I disdain, like charging extra for a seat assignment
or a boarding pass, but those are more visible when buying the ticket and I
can more easily avoid it.

I do think if we could get much better and clear labeling on the differences
between available seats (pitch, width, recline, power, screen, entertainment,
food) it would help a lot. But airline shopping is already very painful, data
overload is a real problem.

~~~
ilyanep
If the problem is that the data is there but people don't understand it, then
you'd see consumers flying a shitty budget airline like Spirit once and then
going back to another airline. People will regularly come back to these budget
airlines. I really do think that consumers' revealed preferences are just not
what most people think they should be.

~~~
zaroth
I can tell you for me, that's exactly what happened. I flew Spirit exactly
once. I couldn't stop telling people how horric it was for weeks and
absolutely I would never even consider flying with them again.

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jccalhoun
It isn't just the seats. Every time I see I'm going to be on an Embraer I
cringe because I can't even stand up in those. If I ever meet the person
responsible for that I will have some strong words for him/her.

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justboxing
Airlines seats shrinking, while waistlines are expanding. Seems like a recipe
for an increase in the number of in-flight altercations.

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cordite
My company isn't going to pay for leg room. Much of the people I meet at
airports are doing so for business, not personal.

~~~
phreeza
Yea i think that is a large part of the problem, a kind of variation of the
principle agent problem. Either your company forces you to take the cheapest
option, so you cannot take into account legroom, or your company doesn't care,
and you don't either since it isn't your money, so the airlines can charge
ridiculous markups for extra legroom.

Google seems to have a good intermediate policy where you can keep money you
save on one trip and use it for upgrades on future travel.

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chiefalchemist
Air travel has become a commodity. Not that it has to be, but most of the
airlines approach it that way. Therefore, and the market parrots this, price
is the driving force. "Race to the bottom" comes to mind.

Simultaneously, most Westerns consider air travel a right. It's not a proper
holiday unless a plane is involved. I'd be curious to know how much air travel
is necessary, and how much is simply a choice. I suspect it's the ladder,
though the market certainly acts like it's the former.

Long to short, if it we're THAT bad (over a 3+ hr flight), less people would
fly. That's not the case, is it?

p.s. I think when you factor in body size, the seats are even more
proportionally small. But that too is often a choice. Moral of the story?
Human make bad choices. Not to worry i'll refrain from making a comment about
politics :)

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jeffdavis
What's the point? If people were willing to pay more, airlines would make
seats bigger. But people want cheap flights, so they get small seats.

~~~
GordonS
The point is that it's a safety issue. Regulation seems like a good way to
deal with this, although I expect there will be _heavy_ pushback from the
aviation industry.

~~~
jessriedel
With 3 million flights a year in the US, there's no way the cost is possibly
justified by any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

> Nobody died in a crash of a United States-certificated scheduled airline
> operating anywhere in the world in 2016...it is the seventh straight year
> that nobody died in a crash on a United States-certificated scheduled
> airline operating anywhere in the world.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-
la...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-last-7-years-
you-were-more-likely-to-be-run-over-by-a-car-than-to-die-in-an-airline-
crash/#4c5d0ec4428a)

~~~
GordonS
How often do planes actually crash? Is it often enough to get statisically
significant data about survival rates in the event of an evacuation?

Also, evacuation after a crash is not the only safety issue - there is deep
vein thrombosis, for example.

~~~
jessriedel
There isn't nearly enough real-crash data for something as specific as seat
widths, but the FAA gets lots of info about this stuff by simulating
evacuation procedures with real people.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2006/03/how_did_airbus_ace_its_airplane_evacuation_test.html)

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laydn
I would really like to see a study of the economics of the smaller legroom.

My napkin math tells me if you remove two rows of seats from an all-economy
737, every remaining seat would get an extra 2.5-3 inches of legroom, which is
significant.

I wonder how much revenue would this change cost to a major airline.

~~~
tacostakohashi
Seems easy enough to work out with further napkin maths - such planes usually
have 24 rows or so, so 2 rows is almost 10% of the capacity / revenue lost
(or, at least, you'd need to be getting 10% more for your remaining seats to
break even).

Or, in absolute terms - 2 rows = 12 seats, so if you imagine $100 fares, with
a few flights per day, you could easily be looking at 5 or 10 thousand dollars
a plane per day.

~~~
laydn
Well, that assumes all planes are always 100% utilized, which is probably not
the case.

~~~
tacostakohashi
Sure, but it's the main case worth thinking about, because from the airline's
perspective, when the plane _is_ 100% utilized the fares are highest so that's
when the extra 2 rows make the biggest difference. From the customer's
perspective, nobody cares about small seats if the seat next to you is empty
anyway.

~~~
ebalit
It might be possible to adapt the layout based on utilization. Fold the first
rows and move every rows forward a bit. Doing this while minimizing the weight
and complying with regulations is seems challenging though.

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danellis
What's the goal of reducing the width of seats? The cumulative reduction can't
be enough to fit in another seat, even on a wide body aircraft.

~~~
tacostakohashi
It is enough - on 777 in economy class, you can do 9 abreast (the typical
option, 3 + 3 + 3), or 10 abreast (3 + 4 + 3), which airlines are starting to
do now.

~~~
danellis
How? If they went from 18.5" to 17", they'd need to have had more than 11
seats already for that to make room for another seat.

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Zelmor
This is not an issue in Europe, as much as I can tell. The seats are
acceptable, and the people are much less inclined to be overweight.

~~~
GordonS
I'm 6", not overweight, and from Europe: seat width and pitch is a big issue
for me. Economy seat width is typically an uncomfortable 17-18 inches, and
pitch typically a painful 31".

I have to fly long haul in economy with work (who won't pay for anything
else), so my choice is either several hours of pain and discomfort, or to pay
a large sum to upgrade myself - if the fare is even upgradable. Bring on the
regulation!

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mc32
My discomfort increases with time in the air. 2-3 hour flight, I can take lots
of discomfort. Long haul there is no-where and nothing you can do but get
lucky with an exit seat or pay up for first class. There is only so much
wriggling you can do.

People are only getting taller, but leg room is deceasing.

My hope would be to see regulation require more leg room for long haul routes.

~~~
jtbayly
"leg room is deceasing"

I hope that was an intentional pun. Leg room is vanishingly small these days,
but I'm not so sure it's entirely gone. ;)

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jeffdavis
Smoking in public places was banned because it's annoying/unpleasant for a lot
of people. But they didn't just say that, they called it a safety issue.

This is the same thing. People are uncofortable, and they want to frame it as
a safety issue.

~~~
GordonS
> Smoking in public places was banned because it's annoying/unpleasant for a
> lot of people. But they didn't just say that, they called it a safety issue

Eh... no. Yes, smoking was annoying and unpleasant for a lot of people, but
2nd hand smoke is _absolutely_ a safety issue.

~~~
jeffdavis
Maybe, but that's not why it was bannned. It was banned because it's
unpleasant.

Tons of things are safety issues that get little attention. Second-habd smoke
got tons of attention.

