Marisa Garcia This weekly post is my ‘round tuit’. Included are stories which caught my eye and others which I couldn’t cover in-depth during the week, but thought Flight Chic readers would want to know about.
Oh, what a week.
1. Mother nature is beautiful. So is Hawaiian Airlines’ iconic livery.
Featured Image: by hnlramper posted to Instagram, used with permission.
Dear Marisa―Unrelated to this week’s stories, but rather the results of a recent very uncomfortable flight because of the hefty passenger with whom I was stuck on a regional (2 seats + 2 seats) jet in a forward row for which I’d paid extra for legroom.
I weigh 155 lbs. The person assigned to the window seat weighed easily twice that. He overflowed into me. When I flinched, he said only ‘Sorry, nothing I can do.’
We have fairly strictly enforced bag size limits on smaller jets (all four flights on this trip, my standard carryon that I’ve used for years nationally and internationally was gate-checked). Why do we not have people size limits?
I’ve looked through some of your back post categories I thought might be related to this, but haven’t found anything specifically related. As a people, we’re getting larger as airlines keep making seats narrower. This can’t go on. Can it? (I won’t for now address lavatories so narrow even I have trouble using them.)
Many thanks!
L Sloan takara@gwi.net
Hi Tara, You raise an issue which I think many people share. It has been a difficult one for the industry to address, though some have tried. Seats aren’t necessarily getting narrower. In fact, seats as narrow as 17″ have been around for as long as there have been seats on planes. But we do have more cabin crowding, now that more passengers are travelling and we do have a push for higher density (that is more passengers in all on the aircraft), which increases the number of narrow seats we see in the market. Examples are when airlines go to 10-across seating on wide-body long-haul planes when 9-across was a previous standard. It’s a complicated issue which I’ve tried to address with a few stories, right from the beginning. You can find some further insights in The Financial Pinch of That Extra Inch and Nutty Seating . But it can’t hurt to cover this topic again and I’ll do that with some new updates. I have related stories coming out on other publications which I’ll reference. Thanks for your feedback and inspiration! Marisa