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Legroom row diverts second US flight →
Call it a sign of the times. For the second time in one week, a US flight has been diverted and forced to land due to a conflict among passengers over reclined seats. Air Marshalls on US flights now have to respond to angry travelers who have lost their personal space to others, rather than responding to terrorists, as was the primarily intent of their presence.
Anyone who has flown on a US economy flight in recent years knows that US airlines have been steadily reducing seat room in order to get more seats on each plane. The airlines want to get more seats on each plane in order to earn a little more revenue from each flight, because most legacy US air carriers have been running at a loss for several years, if not several decades.
Now US airlines have reduced the room in the economy cabin to the point that fights are spontaneously breaking out among passengers. This indicates that a threshold of diminishing returns is approaching. Further reductions in personal space would mean increased disorder plaguing flights, and if pursued further would eventually become unworkable.
If we contextualize this reduced personal space on-board in the overall airline experience, which is pretty dismal, it is no surprise that fights are breaking out on flights. In the past couple of years I have flown economy class and business class and first class. Even on my most expensive flights the service was poor. First class on both US Airways and American was particularly poor; Delta and United were a little better.
Air travel is now the default form of transportation. What buses, trains, and even ships were in the past, airplanes are today. Air liners are the buses of the skies, and airports are the bus depots of this transportation infrastructure. But you can’t exactly operate an airline like you would a bus, because you can’t pull over on the shoulder of the road and push out an unruly passenger.
Hopefully the airlines will realize that they are approaching a threshold of on-board crowding that is unsustainable, and they will pull back even if it means having to raise prices. If they fail to learn the obvious lesson, things will only get worse.
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