House lawmakers pass bill to regulate airplane seat size, legroom
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Honestly, all I want is transparency: Every seat listed should have all the stats about it posted with the ticket price, by law. Right now all consumers have to compare is price and arrival times. If I was able to filter and sort by legroom or seat width in addition to price? I would be able to make my own decisions about my discomfort level in exchange for saving some money.
https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/inflight/air...
Basically if I always upgrade to either economy plus or first since I am almost as tall as you. I also like to work on my flights so I almost always get a bulkhead when sitting in the back.
I'm also 6'3" and have resigned to getting my legs crushed, but my shoulders are wider than most seats, meaning my whole row is miserable unless there's a small child in one of the seats. It's bad enough on public transportation but you'd think airlines could do better.
I have definitely felt the shift to less legroom over the last 15 years I've been flying.
It seems like operating an airline is such a capital intensive industry that once you've established yourself you can 'ignore' certain norms of competition and innovation.
Commercial air travel doesn't seem to have undergone much innovation since the Concorde failed. Domestic flights don't seem much faster or more comfortable than 10 years ago, and service has arguably gotten worse as usage has continued to increase. Airline travel is still so useful that many customers will simply take what is offered because in many cases travel by other means is not possible.
It does not seem like a monopoly because there are many competitors, but I don't know how to describe what I perceive in market terms.
There is quite a lot of innovation going on in terms of fuel efficiency and minimum comfort - https://www.theicct.org/publications/fuel-efficiency-trends-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Futur...
The result of these innovations are cheap prices -
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
The problem is not airlines ignoring the norms of competition. It’s that people just want the cheapest service possible. Airlines sell seats with more leg room for a modest fee (I paid $30-50 for the flights I took today). It’s always easy to get these upgrades, which means not very many people are willing to pay extra.
It’s like PCs. Why does Lenovo/HP sell so many PCs with garbage screens? People don’t care. They just want these machines to be cheap.
As to lack of perceived improvements, it’s because physics hates aerospace engineers. In half a century, jet airplanes have gotten maybe 50% more efficient (during a time when fuel costs have exploded). Billions and billions of dollars have been spent to achieve those improvements.
Maybe I need to try different airlines. I'll pay the $30 (I would seriously pay an extra $100 for an exit row seat), but every time I try to get one of those seats, even months in advance, they're gone. I'm usually on Alaska, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe Alaska customers are just less stingy than others.
Only the 737-800 and the 737-900 "V2" configuration are outfitted with a dedicated section of extra-legroom seats near the front of the economy cabin. In the others (737-400, 737-700, and 737-900 "V1"), the only way to get additional legroom in the economy cabin is to snag an exit-row or bulkhead seat.
For sake of comparison:
* 737-900 "V1" has two exit rows with additional legroom, and one bulkhead row with additional legroom, for a total of 18 seats, in a 165-seat economy cabin, with additional legroom.
* 737-900 "V2" has two exit rows with additional legroom, and four rows at the front of the economy cabin designated "premium", with 3-4 more inches of legroom compared to non-"premium" non-exit-row seats, for a total of 30 seats, in a 162-seat economy cabin, with additional legroom.
The worst configuration is the 737-700, where one of the exit rows has only two seats each side of the aisle; this brings it down to only 16 economy seats available with additional legroom. The best is the 737-800, which has five rows of "premium" plus two exit rows, for 42 seats with additional legroom.
Airlines will focus on what sells and what enables them to turn a profit.
New York is especially bad (2.5 hours at rush hour).
Would I pay a premium for speed of flight? Yes
Do I think that there are enough people to form that use case? Yes!
Will it work? No - the benefit obtained through a fast flight is obliterated by 3rd world airport links into the major airport destinations.
Concorde had a hard beginning - the French and Brits cooperating? On research?! (It uses the French spelling...)
But when you couldn't fly a helicopter to Midtown anymore, or into the City... The clock started ticking. (This last I have from dear old Dad who was in Finance in the Concorde era and through its end)
https://blade.flyblade.com/p/bounce
It's about $200, but if your time is worth a lot to you, it might be worth it, especially since a regular taxi is $60 anyway.
This is why airlines have so many classes - to get the low elasticity travelers to pay as much as possible, while getting as many high-elasticity travelers to fly.
The hotel industry sort of has this problem too- it's hard to know what you're getting- but the concept of "stars" helps ameliorate the effect somewhat.
"Market for Lemons"
Right, and if any of them are different/better, people mostly aren't aware of it. So why would you shell out? If I knew a particular carrier consistently offered an extra four inches of legroom and consistently cost five percent more or whatever, I'd fly that carrier every time. But it's not even consistent within a carrier.
Business/first class of course has great leg room on every carrier, but costs like five hundred percent more.
https://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/traveling-with-us/on...
https://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/products/travelproducts/Pag...
https://exploreamerican.com/maincabinextra/?%20cint=DSP%7C%7...
I would guess most people that need it still won't be able to afford it though.
AA was selling first class for less than coach on DEN-IAD last week.
If you know what you're doing, sure, it's transparent. But the people who fly most often on those carriers are people who never have or rarely do fly.
If airlines wanted to be transparent and encourage competition, they would disclose the seat measurement config alongside the price.
Do passengers want the extra inch or do they want to arrive on time? I'm betting it's the latter.
On-time with a partial refund for not getting the seat they'd paid for is an option, too.
The list of flights assumes I have zero bags, despite saying "including taxes and fees", with no way to get a list that incorporates a bag selection. The "cheapest" flight on Orbitz for my chosen destination is thus United, but with fairly well buried exceptions like "no carry-on bag" (which I didn't even know airlines restricted at all). If I account for the bag (and carry-on United would've told me I couldn't take) Southwest is actually cheaper.
But they are a lot cheaper. And that, it turns out, is what people actually want when they vote with their wallets.
It seems like this is a result of an industry "normalizing." Once something becomes mainstream the quality usually goes down but quantity goes up.
Sure the Concorde was innovative, but the ticket prices were extremely high. In the 80's IIRC a round trip ticket was $1000 from the US to the UK. Adjusting for inflation that's around $3k for a flight.
Taking a quick look....today you can get the same flight from 35 different carriers, little slower of course, but for around $600-1000. As much as people complain about leg room and amenities I think most people care more about price and availability.
EDIT: So, yes: you can do it for under a grand, but you're not getting the glass of champagne.
CDG-JFK round-trip can be done for 300 bucks on Norwegian -- it's insane
Business class will still run you min 2.5k though which is what the concorde was offering
Imagine if five-star restaurants sold leftovers at the end of the night. From the perspective of someone buying those leftovers, it wouldn't seem like the restaurants were competing all that much. That's what's going on with airline coach...you're buying the airline's leftovers from the passengers they actually care about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airlines_by_year_of_e...
What I found most astonishing in the article was the baseline for evacuation:
> Current FAA rules require airlines to evacuate in 90 seconds or less.
Is this even vaguely realistic? Aside from blowing a hole in the side of the plane at every row, this seems completely infeasible.
And it's not 'moronic' to want to take money, ID, medicines and valuables in an emergency in a foreign country. The airline certainly isn't going to help afterwards beyond paying the pitiful per-bag compensation.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. People chosen for these tests are chosen from a random sample of the public, including people of all ages, athleticism, knowledge of airplanes, etc. They are only told that that will be participating in a plane evacuation test and will need to go down a slide. Other than that, they are only given the same safety briefing that every passenger on every commercial flight gets. Airline employees or those with pre-knowledge of the evacuation procedures are expressly forbidden from participating in the test. It's not like these are some "evacuation experts".
The test also has other stipulations, such as requiring some passengers to carry dolls to simulate carrying children, at least half of the emergency exits are blocked off, all lights are turned off, and various pillows/bags/debris is spread across the airplane aisles to simulate conditions in a crash.
>And it's not 'moronic' to want to take money, ID, medicines and valuables in an emergency in a foreign country. The airline certainly isn't going to help afterwards beyond paying the pitiful per-bag compensation.
You're in a life-or-death situation where the options are to try to grab your bag with your certainly replaceable money, ID, and medicines, possibly killing yourself and/or others in the process, or leave them behind? Yes, it is absolutely moronic to even attempt to take them.
Compare Southwest, also a relatively low cost carrier, at 31 inches of seat pitch.
The safest concerns of this are hilarious. Planes are already the safest transit by a wide margin.
This is similar to the congressman who wanted a law to make 1 checked bag free. Yes, make the most price sensitive people force to subsidize this cost. They are no longer rewarded with cheaper flights. (This cost has to go somewhere so all ticket prices would go up.)
Now, if we could just get them to pay for college and healthcare (like normal Americans) at this stage of their careers we might really get somewhere!