Seat belts fit around the waist. How do they measure hip, thigh, and shoulder width? Waist size doesn’t accurately predict who will intrude on the adjacent seat.
Yes, but in return you don’t get squished. So you’d be getting something for that extra money, something that most people seem to value quite a lot.
Bigger people tend to be wider in the middle. Of course there are the triangular-shaped muscleheads. This is where my “cunning plan” needs some work. 
A cattle car like Southwest crams in as many seats as possible. On their new 737s, they are putting in 168 seats. At $125 a ticket (the bargain basement price) they bring in $21,000 per flight. I would gladly pay the ~$60 per seat more if they reduced to two seats per side (Now 112 seats).
The problem is that these seats aren’t available. On airlines like United, it’s legroom and not butt room that you can upgrade to with their Economy Plus seating. (And also, half of those Airbuses they use have fixed arms on the seats so you can’t even buy two and be comfortable like on SW.) Delta operates on a similar principle of legroom upgrades.
If you want a butt upgrade, you have to pay around 3x as much to get into a first class cabin. But most people don’t mind a cattle car - if they would widen the seats even a couple of inches.
Also pregnant women, and men with beer guts. People need to come in standard shapes, damnit!
Then there’s the problem that when a seatbelt is damaged, the airline doesn’t replace it. They just remove the damaged end, leaving a shorter belt. I’ve been on flights where two seemingly identical seats have seat belts that differ in length by as much as 3 inches.
I’ve been on flights where the seatbelt was over a foot shorter than the seat next to it. (I fly too much, I’m realizing.)
Ironically this is one thing el-cheapo Spirit Airlines does right. They offer a wider Big Front Seat that can be purchased for a reasonable price (instead of 3-5x the standard coach seat price, as on most airlines).
There are two separate paradigms for this- business plans and personal rights. When looked at rationally rather than in an emotional and bullying manner, they both point towards a flexible solution.
Gradually obesity is moving from being seen as a moral failing to being a disability. No modern nation is going to charge extra for a disability.
Secondly, businesses need to consider how to run services cheaply and without offending customers or attracting negative publicity.
Both of these models suggest that cost-free and non- bullying methods of solving the problem.
I don’t think there’s a cost-free solution to the problem. But certainly in a time when people are getting both taller and heavier, increasing the seat pitch and seat width to match the population’s current average size instead of sticking with standards set in the 1940s would make sense.
After a water landing, they’ll be able to float with little effort.
If we’re not going to charge more if the passenger doesn’t fit in the seat, how about giving a discount to the person who paid for a seat but doesn’t get full use because of the size of the neighbor? All I want is a guarantee that the seat I pay for will be there for my use during the flight.
If so many people would pay more for wider seats, why isn’t the market responding to this?
People overwhelmingly purchase plane tickets based on price. There is a very small market for premium services. I am all for people having premium services if they want, but I like cheap plane tickets and I’m not interested in subsidizing other people’s preferences when I am perfectly fine with the cheap cramped seat.
It’s called “first class”. But I agree with your post, the market has pretty clearly shown that the vast majority of fliers are primarily concerned with price, and are willing to be packed in like sardines to save 30$.
Cause they don’t want you trying to carry freight as luggage. Or put another way, if the price of flying is so sensitive to weight, why don’ they charge you per-pound on luggage.
But don’t take my word for it. , according to this article the marginal cost of flying an extra 100 pounds is about three dollars. It just isn’t that expensive to fly a fat person as opposed to a lighter person to make it worth the expense, customer humiliation, etc. that it would take to charge obese passengers a few extra bucks to cover the extra fuel.
Or just to argue the same thing another way, a 747 weighs something like 900,000 lbs. A person that is 400 lbs overweight is adding .04% to the unloaded weight of the plane. And fuel costs are only a third of operationg costs.
So if your stuck on a flight with a 550 behemoth, a liberal estimate is that he’s adding .013% to the cost of your ticket. Split that amongst 400 passengers, assume the airline gets zero profit margin, and he’s increasing the cost of your ticket by a wopping 3E-5%
I am too, as long as my neighbor doesn’t take any of my cheap cramped seat.
Good point, Simplicio. another factor that most people aren’t aware of is that commercial passenger aircraft also carry a considerable amount of commercial freight. Passenger weight is a very small component of the plane’s total loaded weight.
I had typed out a response but you said it better and more directly than I would have.
Has anyone ever sued, or even gotten a partial refund, for not getting full use of the space they paid for?
I think airfare should be higher and go back to being more of a luxury instead of a cheap alternative. Raise the cost of seats but in its place, get rid of all extra costs and make the seats bigger to accommodate not simply the average person, but the 90 or 95 percentile of people in terms of size. So if the 95th percentile of people is 250 pounds and 6 feet tall, then design all seats like that and stop trying to cram everyone in.
In addition, they should design planes with more space by removing seats, maybe have a lounge area. Right now, everyone’s forced to sit in a tiny seat for the whole duration of the flight. If I had my way, planes would be designed more like a recreation area, with seats off to one side and an open area for people to walk around in and lounge about.
I don’t believe you are contracting an amount of space. Your contract with the airline is to move you from point A to point B. Can you cite to anything that would indicate that you are contracting for a specific amount of space that the airline must provide?