Legislation for minimum seat size

3 huge cheers for Steve Cohen and Laurent Wauquiez !!!

We’ve all seen the steady decline in comfort as airlines increase their contempt for us fare paying passengers.
No longer, are we seen as customers they need to impress to survive, we’re now more a means to a corporate end. The “, they need us more than we need them” philosophy seems to be the prvelant thinking in airline executive offices around the world!!

In the main, the airline industry has through a combination of deliberate actions, and re-active actions taken due to factors outside its control managed to slide into that category of industries that we have all come to resent at best and at worst detest…..including Banks, Energy companies & off course our railways !!

FDOS – +1

Completely agree, the service degradation in Y is completely costumer driven. If we didnt like it, we still (only just) have choices. But when those suppliers offering choice simply cant compete (Swiss 10 abreast in Y for example), it shows that far too many people buy on price alone.

FDOS – the real problem is that Y+ is often worse than old Y but costs between 2 & 3 times the price – there is no real sensible choice between trying to survive in Y (ok as U say for short day flights) and going for broke in business

LuganoPirate – indeed we are all on average getting bigger (self included) and yet airlines seem determined to push us into every smaller and smaller seats. I’m not a great fan of government legislation of the market but this is an area where I feel it is needed.

Agree with you LP
A while ago I commented on AC’s despicable decision to turn their 777’s into true steerage class. An airline I would have recommended at a heartbeat, I now loathe……

And I loathe PE ……because it’s no coincidence that when AC configured the Y cabin into something that even the worst of worst charter airlines wouldn’t think off making thaer passengers suffer , AC launch a PE cabin to blackmail those of us who can’t afford “C” but can’t bear the ordeal of “Y” ……..

And you’re right about legislation. If someone dies of DVT after flying on an AC 777 I’d like to think that their relatives challenge the AC execs who have knowingly crammed and cramped more people into a space that wasn’t designed for that amount of people, all in the sake of squeezing extra profit, not profit….just extra profit !!

As I’ve already written before for the magazine, the designers of Boeing’s 747 specially allowed for a more spacious wider cabin because they realised that the average person post-WW11 was becoming larger and heavier.

When PA’s 747 entered service (PA was the launch airline) there were just two classes: first and economy.

Economy was configured 9-across and that situation remained the same for a good nunber of years with PA and other 747 customers.

I took a number of JAL 747 flights around the mid-1970s over the Silk Route (in the days when JAL had LHR traffic rights to cities like BKK, DEL and FCO en route for TYO) and the seating was still 9-across.

Legroom too was far more generous. It felt like 34/35 maybe even 36 ins.

Then after the mid-1970s as the age of mass travel truly arrived, the airlines decided to go 10-across …and the rest is history.

FDOS- I agree. But those Y seats were bearable …or maybe it was because I was much younger ! But in truth I do remember it was definitely 9-across and I could stretch my legs and the seat was more substantial.

Indeed we ran a piece in the magazine with a PA 747 interior pic dated around 1970 and the 9-across layout is there.

The extra comfort was needed. Flight times were excessive on long routes. That JAL 747 flight LHR-TYO (not sure if NRT had opened in 1975) stopped in FCO, THR (now IKA), DEL, BKK and HKG.

Anyone after a faster flight would choose the Polar or the Moscow route. But as you can see, even choosing an airline for shorter routes like to DEL or BKK involved long flying times.