A LETTER FROM SEATTLE : Finally Fed Up? : If You’re Sick of Being Smushed, Boeing 777 May Be Just the Ticket

Who says we modern Americans are so soft?

Why, when it comes to some things--say, airline travel--we’re hard as roofing nails. We’d better be if we are going to survive.

Price, destination, frequent-flier goodies, on-time scheduling. Those are what the big airlines say we want. And these are the offerings over which the industry titans compete, often fiercely.

For that, we endure. . . .

We endure that father with grade-school twins who insist on full-recline in the row ahead. We accept elbow-wrestling with the fatuous, overweight grandmother on our flank. We forfeit room for our feet because a business executive has filled the overhead compartment with a greedy garment bag and there is nowhere else for our carry-on. We sit tighter than churchgoers on Judgment Day. We strap ourselves miserably, but ever so meekly, in a 17-inch-wide void for hours on end--and more if there is bad weather--because it tells us to do so right there on the flap of our ticket envelopes.

Tens of thousands of times a day, we prove critics right: Our free market is not entirely free. We pay a price for our bargains.

We may relish getting there, but no longer can we relish going.

Now comes the newest offering for the future of airline travel--the Boeing 777, the jumbo jet of the 21st Century. And it dares tease us with a promise of change. A few people have sat down, reclined, shoved a bag under the seat in front of them, dropped the tray table and otherwise tested it out.

Hmmmmmm. Maybe tomorrow will be brighter, after all.

If only the airline carriers will cooperate.

But what do you want to bet on that?

The 777 twin-jet jumbo has been approved by Boeing for production, and the first of the $100-million-plus airplanes is to be delivered to United Airlines in 1995. Among its promotional talking points: The 777 represents the refinement of 50 high-flying, pell-mell years of commercial aviation. Here is what the world’s biggest airliner manufacturer has learned about what the traveler wants after millions and billions of miles of prologue.

Either that, or here is a how to cram the skies with still more dispirited travelers, their expectations long ago deadened.

At this point, no telling which.

It’s a matter of the three Cs.

As affluent baby boomers grow older, broader, creakier, more temperamental, but no less self-indulgent, will they continue to opt for rock-bottom Cheap? Or will they seek more Comfort? Will they even be given a Choice?

Boeing bet 5 inches the answer will be comfort.

That’s how much wider the 777 is over its chief domestic competitor, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11. Both are wider than the equivalent airplane made by Europe’s Airbus Industrie.

Five inches is enough to widen each seat just enough to notice. But, Boeing engineers note, 5 inches is not so much wider that profit-hungry airlines could try to squeeze one more coach passenger into each aisle.

Such temptations usually prove irresistible.

“They’ve tended to crowd us up a bit,” says Duncan Mulholland, payloads engineer for the 777 project. Indeed, by his quick math, if a company can squeeze in just 20 extra seats in each plane in a fleet of 10 wide-body jets over a 10-year span, “they’ve just bought themselves one extra airplane.”

Mulholland is showing off a mock-up of the new jumbo-jet interior. With ultra-high ceilings and recessed overhead bins, no airplane--not even the larger 747--offers such a feeling of overall cabin space, and none, says Mulholland, can be configured more comfortably.

Underline the qualifier can.

“This aircraft permits reduced-fare travel at existing comfort levels. Or, more comfort at existing fares. Or, much more comfort at higher fares,” he explains.

United, the charter buyer of the 777, tentatively decided to offer passengers nine-across seating in the coach cabin--arranged 2-5-2. That will permit seats that are 1 inch wider than its largest coach seats now, those on the 767, and 2 inches wider than on other United planes, the airline reports.

Plus, says Executive Vice President James M. Guyette, “We are exploring a brand-new seat design. We’re going to seat suppliers, not just here, but around the world, looking for a seat with maximum comfort, maximum living space.”

Now for the bad news.

Wider seats are nice, but what most travelers want more of is leg room.

Boeing recently completed an exhaustive series of marketing tests in which Seattle-area residents were randomly asked to try out 777 seating.

“People tend to be like balloons,” says Mulholland. “Squeeze them one place, and they pop out somewhere else. We found that if someone is squeezed on the sides but you give them leg room, they don’t feel so crowded.”

In the airline business, leg room and the space in front of your torso are called “pitch.” It is the measurement in inches from any point on one chair to the same point on the chair in front. Coach-class pitch on domestic carriers runs from 30 to 34 inches. If that does not sound like much difference, imagine you have a 34-inch waist and are asked to wear a pair of jeans with a 30-inch waist for five hours during a flight from Los Angeles to New York. That’s pitch.

As one might guess, there is no relationship between airplane length and seat pitch. So the design of the 209-foot-long 777 becomes immaterial. The choice of pitch is made solely by the airlines. The airlines say the consumer dictates the choice by demanding low fares. That’s why many airlines keep their pitch in the 32-inch range--just enough room to keep passengers from open revolt while squeezing in a maximum of seats.

Guyette says United does not plan to offer extra leg room in its 777 coach cabin.

That may or may not be what the consumer wants. Residents here were seemingly delighted to participate in Boeing’s 777 seating study. People solicited by the company were told that this would be a chance to speak their minds on airline comfort.

They were asked to rate seating options that went from, as one participant put it, “nice to pretty uncomfortable.”

After all the buildup, survey participant Gemma Borg, who flies primarily on pleasure trips, was disappointed.

Rather than trying to determine what was the most comfortable, Borg says she felt the study was geared to find out how many people could be squeezed together before they started feeling acutely uncomfortable--”how many people could they get in a row across.”.

She is not the only one to wonder if comfort is just a blast of hot wind in the air travel industry.

What if the airline’s happy-talk, sloganeering advertising has debased the concepts of quality and service? What if consumers have come to believe there is little difference, really, between airlines because there is little relationship between quality promised and quality produced?

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by the airlines to fix images, but can Americans really tell when they are at 36,000 feet which airline owns the “friendly skies” and which “loves to fly” and which is “something special in the air?”

“With only a couple of exceptions, the airlines offer a generic product, a commodity product,” says Ed Perkins, editor of Consumer Reports Travel Letter. “There is so little significant product difference that the consumer usually cannot benefit in quality by picking one airline over the other.”

Perkins says that increasingly tight seating is the No. 1 complaint among his readership of elite travelers.

Sometimes airlines try to break out of the mold. Midwest Express, from its hub in Milwaukee, was Consumer Reports Travel Letter’s “clear choice” last month in the comfort category for offering first-class room at coach prices.

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines has long offered more pitch--33 and 34 inches--than other domestic carriers. It targets West Coast business travelers and boasts that its 18 consecutive years of profitability is unsurpassed in the industry.

The major carriers dismiss these as “niche” airlines.

Alaska’s marketing vice president, Bill McKnight, says that despite his company’s success, he sees no large carrier bothering to compete for comfort. And he adds that most most consumers are not squawking, either:

“Frankly, instead of seeing a consumer movement in this area, we’re seeing just the opposite. If there is a consumer movement, it’s for getting us from point A to point B the cheapest possible way.”

Sometimes the debate over comfort backfires.

Delta Air Lines was embarrassed in September by a “special mention for disdain” from Consumer Reports Travel Letter. This was for flying MD-11s with 10-across charter-style seating with tight 31-inch pitch. At the same time, the airline’s advertising belittled the competition for treating passengers like cattle.

Delta spokeswoman Francis Conner said the uncomfortable jets had been leased from a Japanese airline company. Delta had already decided the planes were substandard for the U.S. market. She said Delta is purchasing its own MD-11s, which are a modernized version of the DC-10, with nine-across seating and more pitch.

How does an airline determine just how much to crowd passengers?

United says its passenger research “never stops.” Delta says, “We put our own people on the planes.”

But one study by a management consulting firm casts doubt on whether airline executives are in touch with the mood in their airplanes. The study, reported in Consumer Reports, found that executives rated seat comfort as a low priority, lower even than “courteous, flexible airport personnel.”

“Overall, the executives smugly scored themselves ‘good’ to ‘very good’ on their lines’ current coach/economy services,” says the report. “Obviously, few--if any--of them had sat in a coach/economy middle seat for a four-hour flight.”