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Of the many things that can make travelers unhappy with an airline, seat comfort—or lack thereof—is high up the list. “The number one complaint I hear from travelers is shrinking legroom and cramped seats,” said Senator Charles Schumer, who’s tried and failed for years to regulate the size of these contraptions. But when it comes to the actual seat, critics may be blaming the wrong party.
“The biggest myth out there is that Boeing and our competitors build seats,” says Kent Craver, director of cabin experience for the giant plane maker. So who’s responsible? Most consumers don’t know them, but suppliers like B/E Aerospace and Zodiac churn out thousands of seats every year, and their design decisions can spell the difference between a pleasant trip—or a trip to the chiropractor.
Here's what else you may not know.
Airplane seats are more complicated than they look—and it can take five years before a new model hits the market.
Given the importance of this purchase to their audience, airlines naturally want to road test the furniture; they can spend months conducting what’s known as “fanny tests” of manufacturers’ models. Big airlines often recruit hundreds of volunteers through online ads or word of mouth, assembling them in hotel suites or industrial warehouses (always in secret).
Volunteers must submit to measurements—with calipers—of eight different body regions, including "seated hip width" and "buttock-knee length,” with the airlines aiming for a range of what one major European line delicately describes as “diverse physical types.” The subjects are then planted in a sample seat for what might be hours on end before rating the models they’re testing on a dozen criteria—a sort of fliers' ultimate wish list. Among the factors they assess for comfort and satisfaction? Seat foam, the width of the seat, lumbar support, knee space, the back rest, seat height, recline, and the video screen. Still, it’s not an exact science, and sometimes a seat that scores well on the ground flops at 35,000 feet: Cathay Pacific learned that lesson in 2010 when it reportedly had to replace thousands of brand new coach seats it bought from B/E Aerospace, after complaints spiked.
The first fliers had it a lot worse.
We love to imagine that flying used to be a lot more comfortable, but the earliest seats would make today’s coach iterations look like first class. The first airborne chairs—which debuted on a Lawson Airliner biplane in 1919—were made out of wicker; a decade later, the Fokker F-32 had seats that actually reclined but, oddly, were covered in alligator skin. Things started looking up when airlines rolled out sleeping berths and fancier models, such as Pan Am’s sleeperette seats, which debuted in 1949. But the beds disappeared by the 1970s when planes got fuller, and it took another few decades before British Airways brought back sleeper seats to first class in 1996. The basic aluminum frame coach seat debuted in the 1950s and for better or for worse, the essential design hasn’t changed much.
Time matters.
As jets fly greater distances, and a few ultra-long flights approach 20 hours, airlines have a stronger incentive to improve their seats—even in coach. But not all flight lengths are created equal: "The duration for where the seat really starts to matter [to the flier] is about six hours," says Jennifer Coutts Clay, principal at J. Clay Consulting and author of Jetliner Cabins. As a result, airlines are betting that on flights longer than ten hours customers will pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars more for a better seat. The real action today, she says, is in business class, which actually started out as just a few rows of coach seats cordoned off in its own quiet zone. Now, business seats are “far more comfortable than the first-class seats from the 1970s,” and the fully flat beds are de rigueur.
You think you’re paying too much for that seat?
A typical airline seat is priced at between $2,000 and $3,000 for the most humble coach class model and rises accordingly; that’s only the start of what it’s costing the carrier, as every ounce of weight adds to the operating expense of each flight. “You can’t forget the fuel it burns each time the plane takes off,” says a former official at Lufthansa, who was involved in what was one of the industry’s biggest-ever seat orders—for that carrier’s 7,000 new business class seats. Seats in the front of the plane can range from $30,000 to $80,000 apiece, about the cost of a Mercedes-Benz C-Class. And those much touted enclosed cabins—now appearing on Emirates, Etihad, Qatar—could run well into the six figures.
Airplane seats are incredibly durable.
Airline seats, like their automobile counterparts, must undergo rigorous crash tests before they’re declared fit to fly. Anything innovative will draw more scrutiny: Air New Zealand, for example, encountered delays when it sought FAA approval for its novel SkyCouch—a row of coach seats that converts into a two-person bed—due to regulators’ concerns over the adequacy of the seat belts in such an unorthodox arrangement. Government rules on crash resistance, implemented more than ten years ago, require all seats to be able to withstand 16 G’s of impact force, or 16 times the gravitational pull—nearly double the previous 9 G requirement. (The change came after several crashes in which seats came off their moorings.) The FAA also dictates minimum widths for aisles and space around emergency exits.
The incredible shrinking airline seat.
Is it really true that airline seats are getting smaller? That depends on whom you ask. It’s correct to say, as the chorus of critics alleges, that seats are getting narrower—down to as little as 16.5 inches from the previous standard 17 and 18 inches wide before 1980, but it varies greatly by airline and aircraft type. Driving that trend are airlines like British Airways, who are adding a seat to each row of coach in their widebodies. (Emirates is even considering an 11-abreast layout in its main A380 cabins.
Legroom, measured by seat pitch (the distance from a point on one seat to the same point on the seat in front) is also declining, from around 35 inches before the 1980s to around 31 inches now. But airlines have an answer to that one: the new slimline seats actually take up less room, they say, so that effectively adds back an inch or so.
