Seat Pitch, Kneecaps and Passengers Behaving Badly

July 1, 2005 — -- So you're over Cleveland at 33,000 feet and you'd really like to look at the inflight magazine, but your knees are jammed against the seatback in front of you so tightly you're reduced to stealing your neighbor's copy when she goes to the restroom.

Or, you're trying to use your laptop computer when the passenger in front of you decides to recline his seat at warp speed into your lap, breaking your screen (hopefully just your screen).

Or, as singer-songwriter Cheryl Wheeler puts it in her bitingly sarcastic song "On the Plane":