Opinion: If airlines won’t give us more legroom, then seats shouldn’t recline

A rash of in-flight fights among passengers over legroom on airplanes in coach has me wondering: How has this not happened before? The incident that got the most attention involved a passenger who deployed the Knee Defender to the back of the seat in front of him to prevent it from reclining into his lap. My response to that was: Where do I get one?

As planes get fuller and seats narrower and legroom shorter between seats, airline officials and their trade reps are full of excuses and explanations for all
this. My favorite: “Hey, this is how we keep prices down for the flying public.”
Translation: “Hey, this is how we keep profits up for us.”

As my colleague Hugo Martin wrote in a front page story for the Times this week, moves to squeeze more passengers onto airplanes “have led industry profits to near-record levels.” Gosh, it seems like only yesterday we worried for airlines over the soaring price of fuel and the constant fear of terrorism. Well, now airlines face a new threat of violence — from their passengers who are tired of being herded into claustrophobic airplane cabins. Martin asks in his story: “But have they pushed passengers to a breaking point?”

Sure seems like it. Airlines counter that passengers can pay a premium for seats with extra legroom. OK. However, many times those seats are sold out on planes.

But here’s the more important point: airlines should not be selling seats on planes — at any price — that come with someone’s head in your lap. (Although I suppose airlines could discount those seats by half the price with fair warning.) It is a profound invasion of your personal space to have the seat in front of you lunge back into your lap, your chest, your face. Of all the annoyances of cramped flying — smelling other passengers’ nasty fast food, hearing the music blaring from their headphones — reclining your seat back into someone is just about the rudest thing a passenger can do. (Well, OK, besides maybe one other thing, but you get my point.) I can’t believe more fights haven’t erupted over this. And if I were the flight attendant on that flight where the guy used the Knee Defender, I would have told the passenger in front of him to stop complaining about not being able to push her seat back.

I have a very simple solution: take the reclining function off seats in coach. If airlines expect passengers to fly with less legroom, then they should also make them fly in seats that don’t recline. Passengers who grumble that they like to recline so they can nap should get over it. This is not a hotel room. It’s an airplane. And you’re in the bleachers.

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