As major airlines continue to feel the crunch in their pocketbooks, their passengers are feeling it in their seats.
By STEVE HUETTEL
Published July 21, 2003
Thanks to some nifty engineering, certain Southwest Airlines flights now have more room for wide-bodied passengers.
Seats in some of the airline's newest jets are equipped with a special armrest that hangs down half as far as a regular model. The "HDK armrest," named for Southwest chairman Herbert D. Kelleher, provides extra room for hips to spread across the seat cushion.
"We don't want our passengers to feel constrained," says Kelleher, who came up with the idea in the late 1990s and is finally seeing it put in place. "We want to get a seat that's comfortable for the majority of people. I don't think anything's more important to customers than the seat they're in."
Most travelers consider coach seats as comfortable as airline food is appetizing. No matter how alluring the destination, no matter how engrossing the in-flight movie, there's no escaping that wedged-in feeling of seats that are too narrow and rows too close together.
Now, as the airline industry muddles through its worst financial crisis ever, carriers are taking a close look at seats. And they're coming to different conclusions.
Some airlines that offered extra room during the economic boom are jamming seats back into the coach cabin, leaving passengers feeling more scrunched-up than before.
American Airlines is scaling back its 3-year-old "More Room Throughout Coach" campaign and putting more seats into about a quarter of its fleet. Passengers flying the world's largest airline to certain leisure destinations will lose about 3 inches of legroom.
Midwest Express, a longtime favorite of frequent fliers for its all-business-class cabins, is launching a low-fare service to vacation markets, with less legroom and narrower seats.
But other airlines are making an extra inch or two of roominess a selling point. Contrary to their image as no-frills Greyhound buses in the sky, some low-fare carriers offer some of the roomiest coach seats.
When Delta Air Lines launched Song, its new all-coach brand, the airline said customers would have more legroom than on any other low-fare carrier. They've also got more space than most passengers in Delta's regular coach cabins.
Now, JetBlue Airways says it will pull one row of seats out of every plane and give most passengers extra leg room - an inch more than Song. Besides providing extra hip space, Southwest's newest jets also have above-average leg room.
Southwest, JetBlue and a few other low-fare carriers are the only airlines making money and expanding during the industry slump, largely because of their low operating costs. (Delta doesn't break out financial results for Song, which began flying in April.)
By offering more comfort in coach, they'll gain another competitive advantage over traditional airlines with larger route systems and first-class cabins, says Matt Daimler, who runs SeatGuru.com, a Web site that rates seats on major airlines.
"The leisure market is about competing on fares," he says. "But when low-fare carriers make such strong offerings, people say that they can have their cake and eat it, too."
What makes for a comfortable airline seat?
The most common yardstick is "seat pitch," the distance between a point on a seat and the same point on the seat in front of it, such as from seat back to seat back. The pitch for a typical U.S. airline coach seat is 31 to 32 inches.
Second is seat width, the distance between arm rests. That is usually 17 inches, although airlines sometimes squeeze in seats as tight as 16 inches where the plane's body narrows.
After that come smaller but nonetheless important details.
Does the seat recline? Back row seats often don't, and those in front of emergency exits rows sometimes don't.
A firm seat cushion is more important on longer flights than shorter ones where passengers aren't sitting long enough "to groove them," Kelleher says. But when the seat back is thick to accommodate built-in video screens, it can intrude into the space of the passenger behind when reclined.
Further complicating the task of building a better seat is the variety of passenger body sizes, says Klaus Brauer, an expert on airline interiors who works for Boeing's commercial airplane division.
"The trick of designing a good airline seat is if it matches the widest range of people," he says.
Frequent fliers such as David Cox of Clearwater become experts on which planes have the best coach seats and which seats are most comfortable on a given model. Some road warriors prefer sitting in exit rows or in front of a bulkhead for the extra leg room.
Cox, a US Airways Gold Preferred flier who stands 6-foot-2, tries to get an aisle seat for stretching his legs and usually convinces the airline to leave the middle seat open. He dreads flying coach on Delta 757s, known among frequent fliers for their particularly tight seats.
"If the guy reclines (the) seat in front of you, his head is 6 inches from yours," says Cox, a marketer for a plastics manufacturer. "Forget about using a laptop. You can't even open it up."
You can get a comfy seat in first class, with a seat pitch around 37 to 40 inches and a typical width of 19 to 21 inches. But few travelers pay first-class prices. Most flyers in first class are frequent fliers with upgraded, high-priced coach tickets.
"Everybody wants more leg room and a comfortable seat," says Bill Pacelli, an aviation consultant in Fairfax, Va. "But it's amazing how few people are willing to pay for it."
Making extra space is a costly proposition.
Removing just one coach seat costs an airline about $132,000 a year in revenue, says Pacelli, who studies the economics of cabin seat configurations.
But as business fares skyrocketed in the late '90s, he said, some airlines decided to do something for high-paying customers who couldn't get into first class.
United Airlines created "Economy Plus." The carrier added up to 5 inches of seat pitch in the first six to 11 rows of coach. United reserved the seats for elite-level frequent fliers, elites on its partner airlines and those paying top coach prices.
American upped the ante, removing 9,600 seats from its fleet to expand pitch in every coach cabin to as much as 35 inches. The airline heavily advertised the slogan "More Room Throughout Coach," with a photo of crossed legs that seemed to have plenty of room.
American probably managed to make money at first by attracting more big-bucks business travelers in the place of bargain-hunters that airlines use to fill up the last seats, Pacelli said.
But the strategy backfired, he said, as the weak economy and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks drove down demand for tickets and drove down air fares.
By February, the airline will put 2,224 coach seats back into its A300s and 757s, returning seat pitch to the industry standard. The planes getting more seats typically fly to leisure markets including Orlando, the Caribbean and ski reports. The airline hasn't said how much more revenue it hopes to collect.
"We're giving customers the opportunity to fly more low fares on more seats," spokesman Tim Wagner said. "Customers in these markets are completely focused on price, and we didn't want to create an "airline within an airline.' "
That's exactly what Delta created with Song. The all-coach carrier has colorfully painted planes and a casual style that's completely different from buttoned-down Delta.
But while American is cutting legroom for coach travelers flying to vacation destinations, Song boasts new leather seats with a 33-inch pitch, an inch or two more than typical coach seats, including Delta's.
Critics question how Delta can justify the disparity. After all, Song customers are primarily leisure travelers supposedly paying less for their seats. Delta insists Song is a separate breed from its traditionalist parent.
"The Song business model is based on high-density leisure markets, which is a completely different product from mainline Delta," a spokeswoman says. Airline experts say Song needs amenities like extra leg room to compete with sassy upstart JetBlue.
Earlier this month, JetBlue struck back. It trumped Song's claim to offer the most leg room of the low-fare airlines. By removing six seats from the back of each plane, the 3-year-old airline will increase pitch to 34 inches in two-thirds of the cabin.
The idea wasn't to get a leg up on rivals American or Song, spokesman Gareth Edmonson-Jones said. Passengers complained about seats that don't recline in the last row of JetBlue's A320s, especially on the airline's newer cross-country routes.
Executives considered alternatives such as reserving the back row for employees, their relatives and other people flying free. They finally decided to remove the seats and spread extra room through the cabin, Edmonson-Jones said.
JetBlue expects to break even on the change, winning enough new customers to make up for the lost revenue. "We fully expect an enhanced product will enhance our brand and grow our customer base," he said.
From the first day, the airline has offered extra-wide seats - 181/4 inches instead of the standard 17 inches - because the Airbus A320 is about seven inches wider than Boeing's 737.
Southwest picked up extra length in its newest 737 models, allowing the carrier to offer an above-average seat pitch of 321/2 inches. But the new planes aren't any wider, forcing Southwest to get creative to find more space for customers who need to spread out.
Seat cushions on the airline's fleet are 183/4 inches across. But with the old armrests, which measure 3 inches from top to bottom, passengers get only 17 inches to squeeze into. That's where Kelleher's fascination with seating came into play.
Kelleher earned a well-deserved reputation for chain-smoking, swilling Wild Turkey Bourbon and antics such as dressing up as Elvis while he built Southwest from a tiny Texas startup into a Top 10 carrier.
Less known is his interest in where passengers sit. When Southwest went to work to redesign the look and feel of its planes in the late 90s, Kelleher would show up an hour early for meetings on which seat to put in the new 737-700 model.
He wanted to give large customers more room. But Southwest couldn't make the seats wider without encroaching on the aisle, which must be at least 20 inches across by federal regulation. Kelleher says he asked why engineers couldn't cut off the armrest's bottom half so wider hips could fit underneath.
That wasn't a problem because Southwest doesn't have inflight movies or music systems that run wires through the armrests. The new HDK armrest first appeared in January 2002 and now is in 26 of Southwest's newest planes.
Southwest hasn't promoted the new feature because it's on just a fraction of the fleet. But asked to coin a marketing hook, Kelleher puts a twist on American's now-discarded advertising phrase.
1914: On the first scheduled commercial airline flight, former St. Petersburg Mayor A.C. Pheil makes the 23-minute trip from St. Petersburg to Tampa on a wooden seat in the hull of the two-seat seaplane flown by pilot Tony Jannus.
1926: The Ford Tri-Motor 4-AT, the first successful all-metal U.S. commercial plane, starts service carrying up to 12 passengers in wicker chairs.
1934: American Airlines introduces a version of the Curtiss Condor with sleeper berths above the passenger seats.
1948: Capital Airlines introduces the first coach class, called "Nighthawk" service, with night-only flights, no meals and seat rows spaced closer together for less leg room.
1958: Boeing introduces its 707 with folding armrests, opaque plastic window shades and seats supported by two sets of legs, making it easier to stow carry-on items.
