It also makes it hard for people like me who are far above the average height to even fit in a seat. If I'm forced to travel for work, I have to either be very uncomfortable or pay out of my pocket because the company doesn't want to pay for first class. My knees dig into that little metal rod the seat back pouches have or they go into the armrest in front of me, it's absurd how small cabins are now.

So why should we make all seats bigger and all flights more expensive?

Maybe people want cheap flights because they can reliably anticipate having a miserable experience.

Do they pay more for a bigger seat on their next flight?

People aren't buying a only seat, they're buying a whole travel experience. Of which all parts are pretty awful.

The point stands. Do they spend more the next time for a chance of having a less miserable experience or do they fly again with the less expensive AwfulAir?

If they were, don't you think planes would be filled with large seats?

Ah! I completely misunderstood what you were saying, sorry. (But I don't really agree... Not all companies are equally awful. Most of us just want to pay less.)

The point is that it's a safety issue. Regulation seems like a good way to deal with this, although I expect there will be heavy pushback from the aviation industry.

With 3 million flights a year in the US, there's no way the cost is possibly justified by any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

> Nobody died in a crash of a United States-certificated scheduled airline operating anywhere in the world in 2016...it is the seventh straight year that nobody died in a crash on a United States-certificated scheduled airline operating anywhere in the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-la...

How often do planes actually crash? Is it often enough to get statisically significant data about survival rates in the event of an evacuation?

Also, evacuation after a crash is not the only safety issue - there is deep vein thrombosis, for example.

There isn't nearly enough real-crash data for something as specific as seat widths, but the FAA gets lots of info about this stuff by simulating evacuation procedures with real people.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

All the more reason to do research into making sure there isn't a safety issue here. Stats like this just make people and companies complacent until the next tragedy strikes.

Research isn't free. It's very possible an order of magnitude estimate would show that the risks of seat narrowing couldn't possibly outweigh the benefits.

No, they are reconsidering the relevence/quality of studies done that show it's not a safety issue.

That doesn't mean that it is a safety issue.

One problem here is that average size people are the majority.

I suspect average size people are quite rare, actually - definitely not a majority.

In the PDF sense they are.

The question in the article is: is it a safety issue?

Does the article answer it, or just spend the entire time on the more poulist point that airline seats are uncomfortable because airlines are greedy?