The unwritten rule is that "the middle seat sucks, they get both middle armrests". Sadly, not everyone knows that rule.

> "The seat you paid for has borders. Middle-seat elbow ownership ends on the armrests (you’re entitled to both)"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/article-a-parent...

Most planes I fly on, the middle seat is not wide enough for them to do anything else. Three full-sized males sitting next to each other will be physically touching shoulders.

For real. I always think of this bit[1] while I'm riding in the middle.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFx1Cpxpx1E

Great bit!

Didn't know this was a thing, I feel bad now. I've probably taken someone's armrest before who sat in the middle. :(

That was a great read. Thanks!

Whoever takes the armrest first gets priority. It may cause your lifetime happiness to have a little more volatility but since everyone has the same random chance of getting the middle seat, still fair.

Your chances of getting the middle seat go up as the other seats are taken, meaning that a lot of the people in the middle seats are people who had to book that ticket on short notice: death in the family, emergency business trip, other flight got canceled, etc.

The airline's already got "being crappy to the person who's having a crappy day" covered. Don't be the human embodiment of an airline.

I flew in a lot of middle seats and it’s because I was a young unattached guy booking last minute trips at high prices.

If you think getting the middle seat is random chance I’ve got news for you.

Go buy a plane ticket right now. Don't even need a credit card to get to "choose a seat" and you will see, all the aisle and window seats are taken by default.

You have to pay extra to not get a middle seat.

It's actually a bit annoying to have to explain this to you based on your childish reply.

What airline is this? I haven't noticed this. As long as I get the tickets early enough, there are always window and aisle seats available.

I think it depends on the airline. Most of the budget European airlines I fly with will allocate you a middle-seat by default if one is available when you choose the free "give me a random seat" option at check-in. I presume this is to give away their paid seat inventory as slowly as possible, and also because by giving the passenger the worst available seat you get more value from paying to choose your own seat. Of course: they have a limited number of middle seats to give out so I've found that a good strategy is to check-in five minutes before the online check-in cutoff time which usually yields window/aisle seats and frequently (~30%) exit-row seats.

I prefer window, and I get window basically every time.

Airline "Southwest" allocates most seats based on when you click "check in". If you check in earlier, your boarding position is closer to first, and your chance of getting a desired seat goes way up. You can pay extra to board earlier ("Early bird") for $15. They don't have classes (there is no "first class" or business or coach) but you can pay for other features like cash-refundable tickets or boarding first.

Airline "Delta" simply lets you book your seat, so if you buy reasonable early, you can book a desired seat.

For other airlines, if the cost to upgrade to a window seat is on the order of $10-15, then I do it.

So I think your experience is limited to a small number of airlines, and your description of the OP as "childish" is poor.

Southwest Airlines early check in is $35 at ticket purchase time or $40 at the gate. When flying with my family that’s an extra $200. I like southwest but this is one thing I really dislike about them.

Perhaps it depends on the flight; mine are always $15.

See https://www.southwest.com/early-bird/

What airline charges extra for non-middle seats? I’ve never seen that.

Any airline that sells Basic Economy tickets (without seat pre-assignment) does by allowing seat choice for Economy tickets and above.

In fact, Frontier charges more for the middle seat. I assume this is because middle-seaters are likely to be a couple/family wanting to sit together and forced to pay the premium. No solo traveler would willingly purchase a middle seat, so you don't need to optimize for pricing the middle seats for them.

Seems this wouldn’t work very well. Pick the aisle and window; middle will always trade IME. If you need three across, book aisle, window, and a nearby aisle and you again have tradable seats.

Or book aisle and aisle for a couple.

Maybe they’re just picking up a few bucks from people who aren’t this clever.

I’ve seen this a lot more over the last few years with US carriers. The bottom tier ticket doesn’t let you choose and you have to pay more to get a choice (aisle or window).

It definitely used to be more of a first-book-first-choice policy but now they’re using it as another upsell.

Air France and KLM and Lufthansa don't charge more for aisle/window.

This is categorically untrue.

To whomever can take AND hold the armrest go the spoils of victory. What care I for plaintive cries of "fairness" when nature provided me the means to take the armrest I deserve from less capable arms?

I bet you get a lot of crotch in the face for your actions. Hot, seething, sweaty crotch from every person in the middle seat. The reason people choose civility is that eventually everyone benefits. Lack of civility immediately makes it worse for everyone. People in planes are already miserable, no reason to make it worse unless you enjoy causing others misery, which says more about you than anyone else.

That's why I always begin a flight by bludgeoning my neighbor into unconsciousness.

I personally smear my own feces on the armrests, having come prepared with plastic arm sleeves so that it doesn't get on me.

Please don't do this here.

Sorry, won't happen again.

What do you really want and expect here? They're not going to find extra space out of nowhere, are they? Yes they're just juggling things around. If you don't want to pay any more, there's a limit to what they can do. If you do want to pay more you can already do that! Some flights have four tiers of seating you can pick from depending on what you want and what your budget is.

In 2018, Air France more than doubled its profit, to 409 million a year. Paying more only gets you so much with these huge airlines. They don't reinvest everything you give them. Their goal is mostly to make more profit or increase share value, especially if publicly traded.

Profit in isolation is a meaningless metric in this context. In 2018, Air France KLM carried over 100 million passengers. So the profit is just 4 euro per passenger. That means very small changes in costs per seat can quickly move the company from the black to the red.

Also, with full service airlines, business class is by far the most profitable use of their square footage. Cheap economy flights are really an extraordinary thing, but they’re never going to be the height of comfort. Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.

>Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.

Sounds like you've never flown on an Asian airline. I flew on Singapore Airlines a few months ago and economy there was like first-class on an American airline, but with smaller seats.

It’s probably the airline I’ve flown on the most. The flight attendants are nice, and you get a little ammenities bag. But none of that changes the fact that you’re packed into an economy class seat for x hours. The food is honestly not any better that other full service airlines either.

Honestly, I have no idea where you’re getting this from. There’s certainly economy classes out there worse than SG, but to compare it to any first class experience is complete nonsense.

> I flew on Singapore Airlines a few months ago and economy there was like first-class on an American airline, but with smaller seats.

With flat beds and everything? How can they possibly afford that?

Perhaps I should say business class.

Anyway, I'm talking about the level of service and comfort: great meals, blankets, pillows, beautiful and friendly flight attendants, hot handtowels, free wine/beer, even some warm socks for wearing to the bathroom, are all standard in economy class. Several of these are probably not even available in First Class on American carriers, such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol.

> Several of these are probably not even available in First Class on American carriers, such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol.

I think you must have an atypical experience of US business or first.

Towels, socks, free alcohol are all basics on US carriers that you always get in business or first.

Free alcohol is available even in economy on every US carrier I’ve been on.

>Free alcohol is available even in economy on every US carrier I’ve been on.

Citation needed.

>>such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol. >Towels, socks, free alcohol are all basics on US carriers that you always get in business or first.

No, I'm not talking about towels, I'm talking about a handtowel. It doesn't exist on US planes, because it's an Asian custom. It's a hot, wet towel that they hand out to everyone before every meal so you can wipe your hands. It's called an oshibori in Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oshibori https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/22372/in-asian-re...

> Citation needed.

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/inflight/eco...

"Complimentary house beer and wines, soft drinks, juices, tea and freshly brewed illy coffee"

That's in economy.

> It doesn't exist on US planes, because it's an Asian custom. It's a hot, wet towel that they hand out to everyone before every meal so you can wipe your hands.

Yes, hot wet towels. You get them before meals on US carriers as well. Here's a video of them being handed out in economy on a domestic US flight.

https://youtu.be/KzUyCxFLQP8?t=85

Believe me now?

You're moving the goal posts. Why are you now saying you're only talking about domestic? You didn't say that before.

> Why are you trying so hard to defend American carriers anyway?

Just resisting your aggressive denial of what I know to be true and accusations that I'm lying (about hot towels, for some reason)! I don't know what parallel universe you're living in but I know what I've seen.

> Do you work for one of them?

No.

I'm not moving the goal posts. I've never seen free alcohol on domestic flights, and I don't see why I should restrict comparisons with international airlines to international flights with domestic carriers. A flight is a flight.

As for hot towels, you'll have to do a lot better than a Youtube video with quizzical comments because apparently none of those people have ever seen it either. In fact, if it were so common, why would someone bother to post a short Youtube video of this? Obviously, given the focus of the short video and its title, the fact that they're handing out these towels is new and novel. And as I've said, I've flown domestically countless times, since the 1980s, and I've never seen this, ever. They would almost certainly do it for flights to/from Asia because it's normal there, but Americans aren't used to hot towels. After all, they never serve them in restaurants either.

I don't know what else to tell you - your experience doesn't match mine. I guess we're not going to agree.

I have definitely had hot towels and free alcohol on US domestic carriers. I'm not imagining it.

I can understand your fellow debater getting frustrated here. Whilst at times you each seemed to be confused about what the other is asserting (i.e., international flights vs domestic flights), at other times you are asserting things that are generally known to be incorrect.

Complementary alcohol - as a standard offering - is not normally offered to basic economy passengers on domestic flights in the U.S., and hasn't been for at least a couple of decades.

That said, some airlines offer it as a promotion on some flights [1], which may be why you have experienced it. But it's not a norm that any coach passenger could expect on any domestic flight, the way it used to be in the earlier days of commercial air travel.

The video you shared of hot towels being handed out in economy on a domestic U.S. flight was a one-off promotional event. It's also not the norm.

Like I said, I get that the two of you were talking about different things and were sometimes confused about what the other was talking about. But you did inflame things by asserting/suggesting things that aren't really the case.

[1] https://www.globaltravelerusa.com/american-airlines-to-offer...

That’s how we are going to end up with standing only places and paying for the toilet. Do not accept the unacceptable.

I think the subtext is that flights aren't supposed to cost what cheap economy flights cost; they should be substantially more expensive. So you can "unaccept" the discomfort by paying for them what they should cost.

Is how I read the previous comment.

I can get a seat on a flight that will take me to the opposite side of the world in less than a day for ~$600. That’s not unacceptable, that’s amazing. Cheap and fast international travel has to be somewhere on the list of most revolutionary post-industrialisation innovations.

Varig was an airline in Brazil that was amazingly nice. Even economy seats got real blankets and actual silverware for dinner.

You'd love it, if it were not for the fact that they went bankrupt in the 90s when the first low-cost carrier entered the Brazilian market.

There are plenty of carriers (some might even say all of them) today without standing places where you don’t have to pay for using the toilets and many of them are profitable. You don’t need to accept ridiculous things for that. It’s just that every time, one of them will try to squeeze just a few more cents out of you and if the public allows them to do that, all the others will jump at the opportunity.

> many of them are profitable

Until they aren't, and either they need to find way to cut costs or extract more value per-passenger.

> You don’t need to accept ridiculous things for that.

Then don't? What's stopping you from not flying with low-cost carriers?

I already avoid easyjet/ryanair, even if the tickets from some company like KLM/Aegean costs more than double.

The same seat gets used on most days, by many different passengers (and many of them are used by multiple passengers per day).

By a conservative estimate, profit per seat per year would be large hundreds to small thousands of euros.

409 mm on what revenue? The airline industry is insanely competitive and generally has tiny margins

..... and?

Is your business' goal something different?

People can fly on different airlines. I used to treat myself to cityjet now and then for a nicer experience when flying DUB->LCY. But usually I took Ryanair, because I valued saving ~100 EUR more than a somewhat more pleasant flight and less time in transit.

There are plenty of businesses whose goal is not mainly profit, but selling a good product/service. RSE and environmental issues are more and more important to businesses. Paying good salaries should come next. Profit for people already rich enough to invest should come last. That's the only way to get sustainable growth and a healthy society.

I believe deeply that we need a profound, fundamental reorganization of our economy and culture to avoid apocalyptic climate breakdown and social collapse.

But, right now, starting a business with goals that aren't profitability leaves you vulnerable to somebody else who _will_ maximize profitability.

In your own life, even, trying to do things that don't maximize profit (taking more holiday, etc.) leaves you vulnerable to competition from other workers who will do that.

We need to design systems where maximizing profit (something humans have been trying to do forever) produces behaviours we desire, like treating the planet and other people better. But blaming a single business working within the constraints they find themselves in is unlikely to help.

For example, the lesson of Union Carbide is that it's OK to murder tens of thousands of people through incompetence and willful negligence. Other companies that spent more on safety were effectively punished for doing so, since of course they would have to spend more. This is why we still had Hydrofluoric Acid a risk of killing thousands and thousands of Philadelphians as recently as a few weeks ago.

>But, right now, starting a business with goals that aren't profitability leaves you vulnerable to somebody else who _will_ maximize profitability.

Don't assume that corporations around the world are all run with an American mindset and according to principles taught in American MBA schools.

I don't, and I know this. But they still have to compete with them.

I found that the cost of transit subtracted substantially from the benefit of Ryanair. They tend to fly from out-of-the-way airports, requiring an additional transportation link. It wasn't very expensive, nor are other airports exactly downtown, either. But between the money and the time, it shifted me away from Ryanair on some legs.

Yeah, the train ticket from Stansted to London was more than the flight a lot of the time. I ended up going between them depending on circumstances. If I was booking late (couple days' notice) Cityjet was almost always competitive.

I would have expected something that sounds less like innovation for the sake of innovation and actually adds and benefit.

How this went viral, I'll never know. I see dumb stuff like this on LinkedIn all the time, as it's the new Facebook.

All it was missing is "MIT grad invents..." or "<insert_unrepresented_class> comes up with"

"A couple of inches" is seating gold. Although I'm 6'1' I've got relatively short legs and legroom isn't much of a problem, but I have broad shoulders even for my height. That means that if I'm in a narrow middle seat I'm spilling over into the adjoining seats, and there's nothing I can do about it. This is why I try to avoid Boeings - they tend to have narrower seats as a rule.

Seat width is something people should be talking about as much as seat pitch.

Totally. Places screw around with width a lot too. I did a tour of MLB ballparks this spring and was surprised at the width variance between parks and even sections in parks.

Lowering the seat will also make it quite a bit worse for people with long legs. The height of the usual seats is already too low. It would be better if they raised the middle seat instead but I guess that adds cost/weight.

Raising the seat on a small single-aisle plane might have your head bumping into the overhead if you're tall.

It'd be nice if the seat height were adjustable, but that would just result in the seats breaking down more often I think. I have long legs, but not that long a torso for my height, so a slightly elevated seat would be nice for me, but other tall men might be miserable.

This configuration probably wins them 2 seats or something.

I doubt it has anything to do passenger comfort; else as you said they would have addressed the armrests issue.

I dream of the day that like fat people can have two chairs next to each other, tall people can have the chair in front of them removed for leg space. :+)