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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

As for a flyer's bill of rights it would be nice to have more widebody flights or at least something small but comfortable like the Embraer 195.

What's been lost in this discussion is that the 737 is based on the 1958-era 707 in it's major configuration -- with its circular fuselage it is not built with compatibility with the human body in mind so of course you are going to feel like flying is hell after a transcontinental trip on what was originally intended as a regional jet.

Even if you survive the flight on a 737 you are going feel like you're dead. Since the 737 and A330 represent the vast bulk of planes built, anyone concerned about the environmental impacts of air travel (e.g. climate change, noise) would want to see the 737 get a clean sheet design like the 787.

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I’ve never noticed a difference in comfort between different airplanes. What matters is the seat, and they’re pretty much all the same (and, when different, this does not depend on the type of plane they’re in). Why would I care about fuselage cross section?

The narrow body gives you less room to work with. Delta Economy seats are 17.2” in the 737, 17.9” in the 767, and 18.5” in the 777.

This is entirely up to Delta though (or any airline).

Delta could have easily decided to fill Economy seats on their 737's with 18.5" wide seats... and then had a 2-and-2 configuration instead of 3-and-2 or 3-and-3.

Same is true for the 777, they could go with smaller seats and pack in more seats per row. Likely, the 777 is used for longer flights and they decided a more comfortable seat for an 8-16 hour flight is worth a few less passengers. Or, the 777 might be overweight if filled with too many passengers, so larger seats are justified.

At the end of the day, it's the economics of making these flights - airlines run on notoriously thin margins, and flying a passenger jet is very expensive.

United has a few configurations for 777 economy seating - a 3-3-3 configuration with 18.3" of width and a 3-4-3 with 17.1" of width.

I've flown the 3-4-3 one and will never fly it again, it is super cramped, and even the few inches of extra leg room in economy plus can't make up for the narrow seats.

So being a wide/narrow body jet doesn't really relate to seat width, it's all based on how many seats the carrier can cram in.

https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air... https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...

That makes no sense. Seat width is fuselage width divided by number of seats, minus room for the aisle(s). Wider seats means fewer seats. The airlines make that trade off based on what they think people will tolerate.

Unfortunately, what you want is completely incompatible with the price you're willing to pay for an airline ticket... and likely the amount of time you wish to spend traveling (hub-and-spoke model takes a lot longer than direct flights, due to layovers, boarding and deplaning, etc, and offers fewer departure/arrival times).

Also, a modern 737 can be very comfortable - it depends on the interior layout and choices the Airline (not Boeing) made when leasing the aircraft. Airlines are responsible for the interiors...

If airlines could fill up the seats I’m sure they’d fly more wide bodies. Unfortunately people want direct flights between all kinds of small metro areas. As such even routes like SF to DC only get widebodies at peak travel times like Thanksgiving and July 4th (at least those are the only times I’m able to book the United 777s for demostic flights).

Direct flights and flights more often. There’s more than enough DC-SF traffic to fill a couple of 777s a day, but people would rather have six 737s or A320s with a wider variety of departure times to choose from.

I would also rather board the plane in 20 minutes instead of 50+ minutes for a widebody, not to mention deplaning and waiting for checked bags.

I personally wouldn't. I need an early and a late flight. The driver for all the departure times is, again, efficiency and money.

If you had 777 flights from DC to SF and SF to DC at 6:00AM and 6:00PM, I'd be content, and I think you would satisfy most needs if everyone could fit on those flights. But then you have a 777 idle for 16 hours a day.

If, instead, you had CRJ200s (that can't handle the morning and evening rush) running all day as fast as you can turn them around, they're never idle.

I guess the final point is that people vote with their wallets and fly on the airline with the cheaper CRJ200 tickets...but I wish it wasn't that way.

You need an early flight and a late flight. Bob needs flights in the middle of the day. Jane prefers mid afternoon. Any given individual only needs one flight at one time, but passengers as a whole want options.

United in fact does fly one 777 flight on that route each way but it goes the other way (DC->SF at night, SF->DC in the morning).

Big planes rarely idle much. The domestic legs are generally tacked onto longer haul flights to/from Europe and Asia.

> it would be nice to have more widebody flights

You'll be a fan of the new midmarket airplane Boeing is planning at the moment then.

It's really hard to think of an ideal time that Boeing could reasonably have done a clean sheet 737. They're constrained in how many programs they can run at a time. After the 777, we had the huge 787 program which pushed boundaries a lot.

Then we run into this situation now where a clean sheet 737 was not going to sell and airlines didn't want to wait and retrain their pilots, so they would've switched to the A320 making a replacement 737 untenable at this time.

It seems Boeing would've needed to somehow go back in time and do a clean sheet 737 around the same time as the 757/767 program. Which would've been amazing if they'd done it, but the 737 was still a perfectly viable aircraft back then so how could they justify it.

I usually have less severe jetlag on the 737 MAX 9s compared to the Airbus fleet. I think it's the level at which they pressurize the cabins. In any case, like others have said, it really depends on the airline and seating configuration therein.

Also regarding the climate change, as I understand it, the MAX 9 changes were designed to _increase_ fuel efficiency.

A320.

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