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":

I'm in five, you're in four,

you lean back anymore,

I'll be shoved out the door of the plane.

A long time ago (in a lab far, far away) psychologists found that rats, when crowded together uncomfortably, began behaving very badly. (I'll spare you the clinical details of just what they did to each other.) Today, no researcher need look further than a packed jetliner at the end of a long, hot day to validate some of the same behaviors (or worse) among people. In brief, crowded airplanes are a breeding ground for discomfort, discontent and blind anger, and the airline industry, in its frantic deregulatory efforts to survive rising fuel prices and perpetual fare wars, is making things worse by sneaking the seat rows too close together.

Yes, it's true that cramming more passengers on the same airplane means more income to pay the bills and keep the lowest fares hovering somewhere below cost. It's also true that on shorter domestic flights, comfort takes a back seat to convenience and price. But there are practical limits, and safety limits, as to how far this squeezing of airplane seat pitch should be allowed to go.

Fare Tradeoff or Safety Concern?

Seat "pitch" is the term used to describe the distance between a row of seats (measured, for instance, between the front of your seat's armrest and the same spot on the armrest of the seat in front of you). In a comfortable theater you might enjoy a seat pitch of as much as 36 inches or 38 inches, and in the first-class cabin of most airliners you'll have between 38 inches and 60 inches. But the average pitch of a coach seat in the average jetliner (regardless of who builds it) has been shrinking over the years, and while many carriers still keep their pitch at 32 inches to 33 inches, others have sneaked it down to as little as 28 inches, leaving their passengers in both perceived and actual agony.

But if we decide to put up with the resulting agony to keep those insanely low fares, what's wrong with that?

In a word, safety.

First, airline safety is not served by having to deal with the type of passenger upsets that are routinely bred by discomfort. Incidents can be as mild as a cabin full of sullen people or range all the way to direct, criminal assaults (verbal or otherwise) on flight attendants -- incidents which at the very least distract the crew.

How do you decrease air rage incidents? By being as societally intolerant of the conditions that form a breeding ground for such incidents as we are of the air rage incidents themselves. And clearly, overcrowding and unnecessary discomfort in what is already a physiologically stressful environment of motion, low humidity and high background noise is a really bad idea.

There is another safety question, though, and this one is even more important. All airliners have to undergo a stringent and very expensive process called certification, during which the manufacturer has to prove the new bird has been built to extremely demanding aerodynamic, structural and safety standards.

One of those standards has to do with the number of doors and exit hatches and how effectively they can let passengers get out on the ground in an emergency. All airliners have to undergo a demonstrated emergency evacuation, usually carried out with volunteers in a hangar under controlled conditions. For the test, half the exits are blocked (the "passengers" don't know which are blocked beforehand), and yet once the signal is given, a set of flight attendants has to get all the test passengers safely out and down the emergency slides in 90 seconds.

In reality, few if any emergency evacuations could be accomplished in as little time, primarily because the average filled passenger cabin contains a wide variety of our fellow humans -- big ones, slow ones, confused ones and injured ones, to name a few less-than-ideal situations. People, in other words, who can't move as fast or as efficiently as the designers would like them to would slow down a real evacuation. And, as rare as emergency evacuations are, when they occur, literally every second counts.

The bottom line is that we don't know for certain whether shrinking seat pitches unacceptably increase potential evacuation times or not, but logic would dictate they do. But until the Federal Aviation Administration begins requiring airlines to demonstrate that tighter seat pitch arrangements do not pose a decreased evacuation potential, we're just guessing, and guesswork is not the method that has made air travel the safest form of transportation.