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House passes bill to require minimum standards for airplane seat size, legroom
U.S. House lawmakers passed legislation late Wednesday [October 3] that would give federal regulators the authority to set minimum standards for seat size and leg room on flights.
Tucked inside a 2,000-page funding bill is a provision that gives the Federal Aviation Administration a year to establish minimum pitch, width and length on airplane seats to ensure they are safe for passengers. The legislation, which funds the FAA for the next five years, passed 398-23 in the House and now goes to the Senate.
The proposed law is designed to ensure that what have become increasingly cramped planes can be evacuated quickly in an emergency. Current FAA rules require airlines to evacuate in 90 seconds or less.
That policy hasn't been updated significantly in almost two decades. Investigators at the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, said in June that they plan to study whether the FAA is ensuring that today's more crowded aircraft meet federal evacuation standards.
Commercial airplane cabins have become more cramped as airlines fit more seats on board to increase profits and spread out costs among more travelers. Several carriers have reconfigured their planes to not only include more seats but also smaller lavatories in some cases.
Seat pitch, a proxy for legroom, on commercial airplanes measured about 35 inches in the middle of the 20th century, but that's now around 31 inches, according to SeatGuru. Some budget airlines, like Spirit, offer 28 inches of seat pitch.
[...] The bill also requires a government study of whether airlines' shrinking or reducing bathrooms in favor of more seats on board creates problems for passengers accessing lavatories.
Before going to vote, lawmakers scrapped a provision that would determine whether airline fees, such as those to change a travel date, are reasonable.
WATCH: It's not just your eyes. Airline seats really are getting smaller.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:35PM
A good chunk of travel is business travel, which I wouldn't necessarily view as a voluntary thing.
I recall many years ago (maybe in the 90s) an interview with one of the heads of a major airline (I think it was American). He was asked about these issues and he said that they tried all kinds of things to add value to the flight, such as food choices, comfort options, etc. However, the only thing that significantly drove customer purchasing was the price. They would significantly choose a worse flight experience if it was a few dollars cheaper, so they basically threw in the towel and tried to cram as many seats into a plane as they could.
I think, and from time to time legislation has been proposed along these lines, that the airlines should have to report the expected actual expense and not allow them to charge add-on fees for everything and then advertise just the base ticket price. There should be a common set of assumptions for all airlines, such as checking one bag, or carrying on one item (for those airlines who charge for carry ons), and roll up all the other charges ("fuel surcharge", all those things that are airline charges but they dress them up to sound like federal taxes, etc.).