Won’t anyone think of global warming? Advocating for more leg room and bigger seats is equivalent to advocating for more CO2 per passenger mile in aircraft, which are already large CO2 emitters. For that matter, we should be eliminating first class seating, which has a much larger per-seat CO2 budget than economy. It’s a surprisingly large amount.
But big americans travel there as well. What happens when a 400 pound american wants to fly Lufthansa and takes up 1 and half seats?
They aren’t being denied the ability to travel. They can buy Economy+, Business, or First Class seats right now. Does anyone claim there’s a constitutional right to cheap travel?
If there was a market for planes with all wide, roomy seats (that’s not business class or better), I’m sure someone would be exploiting it. Instead, people go for the cheapest tickets, regardless of how tightly the airline packs people in.
Seats and legroom are too damn small & confining regardless of almost what size a passenger is. A long trip must be a journey into hell for anyone tall or of above average build.
I’ve always been puzzled why air carriers do not set fares with passenger weight somehow calculated heavily in the result. Weight is the key to a successful flight, right?
Charge a minimum for a seat, we’ll say, to give each person a little square footage, then some amount per pound until we reach some measurement of body width, and . . . viola, here’s your fare for the number of space units you’ll need. If you go over some body width, then you pay for more space units.
I would be willing to bet that somebody in some airline has already developed a spread sheet or database to figure this out. They should advance some weight-based formula and see how we all like it.
Incidentally, I have always wondered how airlines prevent all the large people from sitting at one end of the aircraft. Doesn’t it seem that by pure happenstance you could end up with, say, 12 600-pounders in the last couple rows? But that’s off topic.
I think a full second seat fare is a little onerous.
Part of the problem is just how cramped the seating has gotten for even average folk.
I would support a “large section” with seats that are wider and two across, akin to first class, but without the extra bells and whistles. The extra space should cost 1.5 as much — more than a regular seat, but not as much as two seats.
Tall and muscular people are in a similar predicament, but without social contempt that overweight people are subject to.
In all, I’d support airlines responding to the diversity of human body types that exist in the real world, and is just one item on the list of things I wish airlines would do differently.
IIUC that’s what’s being proposed, except that the second seat wouldn’t cost the obese person any extra. Which would eliminate problems like the one you describe in your next paragraph, where obese passengers are taking up space that belongs to their neighbors.
I’m not sure what I think about the proposal, but it does make a certain amount of sense if we think of obesity as a disability. There are plenty of other situations where we don’t make the disabled person bear the cost of their accommodations.
I think it’s fair to point out that many flights are not 100% full. Load factors average from 80-90% across the industry. Certainly some flights are full, but if only 85% of seats are occupied on average, many of them must not be.
In those flights, putting the obese passenger next to an empty seat is a zero cost accommodation. It seems excessively punitive to require the passenger to purchase an empty seat when there will be many empty seats next to other passengers who don’t have to pay for the luxury.
How? This is a generic product they are offering–a seat. You either fit in that space or you don’t, toddler to adult. There are of course many other options–trains, busses, private aviation. I could see an airline saying, a ticket entitles you to X cubic inches of space or some such. People say all the time they want more amenities and space on commercial airlines, but then they vote with their wallet.
If this comes to pass anybody can lie and get a free seat. So I book a flight, tell them oh yeah I’m a big guy need two seats. Then show up at the airport and oh yeah I’ve been on a diet and not so big… now the airline has an empty seat and gosh I have two seats to myself.
I haven’t been on a flight that was less than 98% full in years.
Airlines assume a standard passenger weight (84 kg). This usually averages out and is not a problem. There are cases where passengers have been moved around for weight and balance. I seem to recall one incident involving a football team sitting in the back which had to be distributed.
I assume the flight attendants would notify the flight crew if they saw a large cluster of very obese people sitting at the back or front.
Thr global warming angle is real.
This article’s author did the math for CO2 footprint of a 747’s first class seats vs economy, and found that CO2 emissions were 5.5 times higher per seat. Business class was less, and other, small jets have a smaller difference.
If you give everyone more legroom, you have to remove rows of seats. That not only raises the cost per passenger, but the CO2 per passenger mile goes up as well.
If we are making people lose their jobs and businesses and farms over global warming mitigation, I think our feet can be a little scrunched for a few hours. It seems a small price to pay.
They need to buy a second seat.
But also, obese folks need extra protection too. I’ve seen videos where the obese person buys the extra seat but then the flight gets overbooked and they wind up getting their extra seat taken away from them even though they paid for it.
That’s bullshit and it needs to stop.
Provide various seat widths and legroom on a flight.
During the seat selection process online, use UX to make the user consider their body size and reflect on the discomfort involved when seats and legroom are inadequate.
Of course, to you point, some people will choose budget over all, but no group is a monolith and we miss opportunities for improvement when we let perfect be the enemy of good.
And that’s exactly where it would go wrong. Instead, offer a second seat at a discount if the plane isn’t fully booked. You are then helping the obese without creating a moral hazard.
I imagine most of the time they would be given exit row seats. I’m old enough to remember when there were no extra charges for selecting a seat and the Airline allocates seats at check-in. The agents would then give an exit row seat to people who were extremely tall. Only if they run out of exit row seats would they need ot upgrade.
There’s also those calling for families with children to get seats together in the same row with no extra charge for seat selection where that applies.
Ve haff vays to make you pay.
Free extra seat for “customers of size”? Not too sanguine on it. A surcharge that is less than full seat’s cost, I could see that.
Good luck getting the airlines to forego any chance for an extra buck though.
They do offer different seat sizes and pitches–economy, economy +, business and first. I you are saying someone should get a biz class seat for economy prices, I don’t think that’s a starter. I have a bad back, and if it’s grumpy I really need to lie flat on long-haul flights. Do I get the same treatment?
Seat pitch (for/aft distance) has got smaller for sure, or at least they cram the rear of the plane a bit more while the front is sometimes still acceptable, but, for narrow bodies at least, you can’t really achieve anything by making the seats narrower. If the seats feel narrower that’s because the passengers are bigger. A B737/A320 has been three and three separated by the isle for as long as I can remember and the plane hasn’t got any skinnier.
Some airlines sell seats that guarantee an empty adjacent seat, e.g., Air New Zealand and Qantas, I don’t know if any American airlines do something similar. Something important is you don’t need to sell the passenger two seats, you can get away with selling them 1.5 seats and pair them up with someone else who’s purchased an empty adjacent seat. I guess the question then is, if someone’s paid for an empty seat next to them and the “empty” seat is actually filled with overflow from the next person over, have they got the product they paid for?
Overall, I don’t think people who don’t fit into the seats provided should be provided a free second seat but I do think they should have a mechanism for being able to purchase an adjacent empty seat.
Probably a bit of popularity bias here (is that a thing?) Flights that run at peak times will be fuller and you personally are probably most likely to be flying at peak times because those times are most convenient for the majority of people, whether due to connecting flights, time of day for business travellers, etc etc. You see full flights because you want to fly at times that people are more likely to want to fly.
You can buy an extra seat on Southwest, but it’s a roll of the dice whether or not you’ll be able to keep that seat. I’ve seen flight attendants insist that large passengers who have purchased an extra seat let someone sit there.