Slate's 10 Ways To Fix Airline Seating

Yesterday we covered Slate’s look at what’s wrong with airline seating–it’s not just overweight people who feel cramped on flights these days. Slate asked its readers to come up with some practical solutions to the problem, and today they printed the top ten suggestions.

The first one is something that might help people like our commenter yesterday who said she was flying in a couple of months and dreading being squished into a seat too small for her size: use seatguru.com to research seat sizes before buying a ticket.

Others ideas include:

  • advertise seats by cost per inch so a consumer can better select the seat that works;
  • bribe passengers to switch seats once everyone’s on the flight so that larger passengers get the bigger seats;
  • put a few wider seats on each flight to sell at a slight premium, so that passengers who can’t afford to buy two seats can still buy a ticket.

But my favorite idea is to segregate the reclining seats from ones that don’t move. I’d prefer to just carry a club and knock out reclining passengers, but I’m intrigued by Slate’s method as it doesn’t require the inevitable being-handcuffed-to-my-seat-by-the-air-marshal embarrassment.

“Fat vs. Tall: Plane Common Sense” [Slate]

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