But it does seem unfair to give a paying passenger less than the small amount allotted, and to make them bear the entire burden. If a large person isn’t going to be required to buy 2 seats (or in this case, 2 large people each buying 1/2 of an extra seat), the airline could eat the cost of one “unsellable” seat.
I don’t want to make this political in reply #1 but the “passenger” is an alt-right youtuber.
Flying sucks for all number of reasons, and while I’ll complain in private about an uncomfortable flight, I don’t think we should give professional whiners this kind of coverage.
Am I missing something or did she choose to share a photo where he appears entirely in his seat with his arm pulled out of the way and she appears to be significantly beyond her seat and entirely hogging the armrest.
Well, the person claims they were not able to lower the armrests. That’s why I phrased my OP as I did. I guess I feel that if I have the armrests down on either side of me, that at least somehow delineates “my” space, and minimally limits the extent to which I press flesh w/ my neighbors.
Whatever she thought she was showing in those pics, I couldn’t see it.
Because the larger person is using the space that the smaller person has paid for. If you cannot sit in the seat with armrest down, you should have to buy the seat next to you. The armrests being down is what separates each passenger’s space.
The pics are weird, because they make it look as tho the passenger in purple and the passenger in white are both seated to the complainers’s right. And that knitted sweater or whatever the person is wearing seems to be taking up almost a seat of its own.
I’ll suggest that if a person is large and knows they will be in a confined space, it would be polite to wear clothing with sleeves such that their exposed skin is not in constant contact with their neighbor. Yes, it can be warm and large clothes can be challenging to find, but the person in purple could cover a little more skin.
Given the airline’s response that they serve all sizes of passengers, it might be most appropriate for the airline to eat the cost if one passenger’s size makes a neighboring seat too small.
Even if the youtuber the OP cited is a flake with an axe to grind, the underlying issue is real.
I’ve got a rather narrow body and as such folks who’re a few percent larger than their seat don’t much affect me. But I must admit I especially enjoy the front row of coach where there are hard dividers between the three seats and so there’s never any hip spillage from my neighbor into my space. Yes, we still have to share the armrests, but at least those are permanently in the “down” position. Now we just need to do something about excessive shoulder width.
Ultimately, given competitive pressures in the industry, the politically fraught state of personal “rights” vs fat-shaming vs anti-fat-shaming vs handicapped rights / ADA, I don’t see a rational beneficial outcome any time soon. It is a mess and it will remain a mess.
There was recently an attempt by an advocacy group for “large” people to require the FAA to re-run evacuation tests using lots of “large” people. With the intent of proving that current regulations permit airplanes to be too tightly packed to be safe for “large” people, and thereby opening the door to FAA requiring airline seats to be significantly larger and farther apart in the name of safety. FAA declined to act, saying it lacked regulatory authority to do so. This after DoT comprehensively declined to regulate the issue on consumer protection grounds, again citing inadequate legal authority to do so.
So here we sit. All bunched up and nowhere to go.
A few of the whiniest whiners (on whichever side) will gain occasional compensation and occasional notoriety for essentially random reasons unrelated to merit. And the rest of us (of whichever side) will suffer in grumbly mostly-silence.
Ultimately, the airlines only have so many square feet to rent out on any given flight. As with COVID’s physical distancing rules, if each customer takes up e.g. twice as much space, they have to expect to pay twice as much for the product. Whether they are willing to do that if the airlines are somehow forced to offer that product after the regulators are somehow forced to act by Congress remains to be seen.
I’m always the larger person, I’m wider than most people. It’s not a good situation. Everybody should get the use of one armrest but there will be one left to argue over. I always try to book an aisle seat so I can hang out the side into the aisle, and bulkhead seat or emergency exit aisle because they have more space for my legs also, but it’s not something easy to guarantee anymore if I don’t go first class. I try to be polite and work out sharing the space, and people tend to be accommodating. Maybe they wouldn’t be so much if I obviously didn’t need the space.
My shoulders are wide, wider than the seat. My default resting position is overlapping into the next seat. There’s no way I can “lose weight” and make my shoulder closer. It didn’t used to be this way.
I toured the Boeing Everett plant one day, and at the end of the tour, they asked for people to rate different seating arrangements. One had the seat back only as wide as my armpits! Both of my arms were entirely in the next seat. My review consisted of “are you kidding!”. It seems the airlines adopted them anyway.
I’m 6’3", 205#, wear a 42 jacket. My shoulders aren’t huge, but they are wider than many.
Whether on a plane or in a theater, I pretty much give up any claim to the armrest. I simply make myself as small/narrow as possible, and keep my arms/hands in my lap. But I do appreciate an armrest to limit “spillover.”
It did strike me as kinda inconsiderate that the 2 large people - who were flying together - declined to sit next to each other. I imagine neither of them wanted to sit next to another large person. But if they had, the 3d passenger could have at least had 1 side free from pressing flesh with a neighbor.
At one point one of the airlines had a deal where 2 people could buy the third seat in their row and effectively turn it into a sofa for a more comfortable flight. I also have this funky memory of somehow reclining it to be a more comfortable seating arrangement. Found it, Air New Zealand ‘skycouch’. Makes me think that if mrAru and I do end up visiting Australia to visit friends, it would be a great idea for us.
I agree.
Again, I agree - however sometimes because of an emergency, an air flight might be required [I am not so cold as to suggest someone simply not go to the death bed or funeral of direct family because they can’t fit into a single seat or afford a full on second seat. However, one might suggest that the transit companies make allowance by having several rows in economy have the old school wide first class seats [not the new ones that turn into sofas, but the ones that were an honest 24 inches wide between the armrests] in ‘unsold reserve’ for those with emergency trip requirements [maybe some sort of note from the doc of the person in hospital, or the funeral announcement, not sure what] that don’t get ‘sold’ until pretty much final boarding/wait list time. [sort of like how certain handicap designated seats are not sold in arenas until it is obvious that there are no more handcap people looking for tickets]
And that is patent bullcrap - cramming too many people into too small a space makes for difficulty in evacuating people - I have to practically limbo my way out of a seat if I am not in the aisle, and since I have limited use of my bottom half [yay lumbar stenosis and bon impingements in my hip sockets] that could impede myself and whomever might be stuck in the window seat - and what if they panic, they can get further injured or injure others trying to force their way over the seats of through me. DoT can mandate a certain amount of square footage [?] per passenger, mandate the width of the walkways between seating, and the spacing between rows s they can blasted well mandate the minimum width of seating. In a word [pair of words] Safety Requirements.
Pretty freaking much - they could pop for the third seat between them. Heck, my fit and trim husband and I would figure in a third seat if we were both as fat as I am. Last time we travelled to Germany we popped for the economy plus and they bumped us up to business class [I am sure showing up early, being polite and nice, and packing correctly for stowing our luggage and so forth might have had something to do with it. As an assistance-requiring passenger, I find it beneficial to be ultra organized and polite.]
I just read the article in the OP and don’t understand these photos. How can she have been “wedged between” two people when both photos show them sitting on her right side?
That is a big part of the problem – the widest part of the human body is the shoulders. But for some reason seat width standards, for not just airliners but also things like stadium seats, are based on the width of the average person at the hips. Which makes no sense when you’re putting seats that close together.
Didn’t it? Boeing narrowbody jets have been the exact same width since the 707. And they have had a 3-3 seating arrangement in economy class since the 707 as well. So it stands to reason that the width of economy class seats has been the same since at least the late 1950s, too.
I’d guess the main difference was that pre-deregulation, planes were far from full, except maybe around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so most of the time the middle seat was empty.
Now with widebody aircraft like the 747 and 777, yes, the seats (and aisles) in those planes are narrower than they used to be, to squeeze in an additional seat per row.
I’ve haven’t seen a public non urinal toilet that I could stand in with my hips square to the toilet without my shoulders pointing to 8 and 2 o’clock in decades.
The only photo that made sense in that rant was one apparently showing how she couldn’t lower her tray table because it would have impinged on her oversized neighbor.
Unless her seatmates were refugees from “My 600-Pound Life”, blame falls on the airline for…
I still recall a semi-nightmarish time some years ago on a flight out of Idaho. The seats were super-downsized and tightly packed to the point where sardines would’ve been wailing for reparations, and if we’d had to evacuate it would’ve taken forever to get all those wedged-in souls out of there.
