A Brief History of Legroom

Episode 4:

Has your airplane seat felt a little tight lately? It’s not just you—it’s the evolution of legroom on passenger planes, and it’s not getting any roomier.

We talk to Marva Semet to discuss how this battle for inches came about. Semet finds that spaces weren’t always so tight on in the early days of aviation, when flying itself was a luxury for the very few. During the 1940s, airlines realized that “the more people they could fit into an aircraft, the better.” Nowadays, airlines consider pitch (the space between a point on one seat and the same point on the seat in front of it) and width in passenger configurations when purchasing planes, and these numbers can be the difference between a comfortable journey and a torturous trek.

Step inside our famous passenger planes: the Boeing Model 80-A, the first Boeing 747 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Transcript after the player.

Transcript:

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by the generous donors supporting the Museum of Flight. You can support this podcast and the Museum of Flight's other initiatives across the United States and the world by visiting museumofflight.org/podcast.

[Music]

SM:     Hello, and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I am your host, Sean Mobley. If you are like 100 percent of passengers on airplanes these days, you've probably had the experience of nestling into your seat on the plane, only to find what little space for your knees you had vanished when the person in front of you decides to take a nap and lean their seat back. If you're like me and listen to podcasts when you fly, maybe you're in that situation right now. Was it always like this? Were passengers perpetually subject to a wretched game of inches played on us by the airlines? One of our docents at the museum, Marva Semet, did a little digging to present you with a brief history of legroom.

[Music]

00:01:15

MARVA SEMET:      The anxiety begins, I picked my seat on the seat map. Will my knees press against the seat back in front of me? Will the person in the seat next to me spill over into my seat? And if the passenger in front of me reclines their seat, I just know I'll be miserable for the duration of that flight. You've probably heard the jokes about making the coach cabin seem less crowded, like eliminating pillows, removing padding from the seats, or using very thin flight attendants. Flying wasn't always like that.

            In the beginning of commercial aviation, there wasn't different classes of seats. That's because everything was first class. Prices were expensive, and airplanes, such as the Museum of Flight's 1929 Boeing 80A displayed in the great gallery, has 18 padded wicker seats and reading lights. You got dressed up to board the aircraft because the fact you were flying to your destination was a luxury. You could stretch out your legs in front of you as you read the newspaper, while being served a sandwich, apple, and coffee. It would impossible to open a newspaper seated in coach today, and your laptop may end up slammed against your chest should the passenger in front of you decide to recline their seat.

00:02:35

MS:     In the 1940s, the first classification for passengers coincided with airline contract airmail routes for the U.S. Postal Service. These flights carried paying passengers too, along with many stops, sometimes overnight stays at all hours of the day and night. A cheaper fare would be to take off, say, 2:00 a.m., make two stops along the way, but got you to your destination. If you paid more, you could get a daylight, non-stop flight to your destination. Studies have shown cost is what a person considers most when deciding on which flight to book. The airlines tried to lower the cost of travel and still make a profit. So, the more people they can fit into an aircraft the better. Airlines run a difficult business. Each flight is an expensive gamble as to whether or not you will buy a ticket, and chances are you will.

            Two million five hundred and eighty-seven thousand passengers fly every day in and out of U.S. airports. Higher price seating was presented to passengers in the 1950s. These seats weren't more comfortable. They were more convenient. Vacationers would pay less if they booked a flight in advance. A business customer would pay more for last-minute tickets. The seats were the same. Once on board, the passenger had plenty of legroom. In fact, business class today was spatially very similar. Today, seat comfort is highly dependent on what a given airline orders for its passenger configurations when purchasing the airplane.

When talking about the size and comfort of a seat, the two terms used are pitch and width. Seat pitch refers to the space between a point on one seat and the same point on the seat in front of it. Today, the pitch in economy class is 29 to 32 inches. The seat pitch on low-cost carriers can be as little as 28 inches. More seat pitch can mean more legroom, but legroom is also affected by the thickness of the seat back and how many things you manage to stuff in the seat pocket in front of you.

00:04:52

MS:     However cramped you may be in an airline seat, all airplane seats must meet FAA standards for durability and head impact protection. The seat has to withstand 16 times the force of gravity and the cushions are fire-retardant and self-extinguishing. The shrinking passenger seat has compelled consumer advocacy groups to go to the courts to request more oversight by the FAA. Recently, an appellate court decision in Washington, D.C. concluded the Federal Aviation Administration should oversee the size of cabin seats in commercial aircraft. A three-panel for the Federal Appeals Court said the FAA had relied on outdated tests and studies before deciding seat spacing was a matter of comfort, not safety, should a passenger have to exit the aircraft in an emergency.

This has always been the FAA's primary directive, and aircraft manufacturers must demonstrate this in order for their aircraft to become certified. The incredible shrinking airline seat is a term Judge Patricia Millett wrote in her ruling. "As many have no doubt noticed, aircraft seats and the spacing between them have been getting smaller and smaller, while American passengers have been growing in size."

00:06:16

MS:     In the decade between 1969 and 1978, three things happened to change passenger comfort in an airline seat. Boeing 747 with its supersize and double deck cabins gave the airlines rooms to segregate passengers by class, like the old ocean liners. Two, the introduction of the supersonic Concorde aircraft, which cross the Atlantic in less than three hours, was to be the first first-class only airline. And last, but probably most importantly, President Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act. Before that, because of government regulations, airlines didn't have control of their ticket prices. The Concorde has 100 seats, and on average, less than one-third of those seats were occupied by paying customers. You could get a seat on a Concorde by using your miles or on an upgrade to first-class. It costs $7,000.00 to fly three hours from London to New York in 1970, but the seats were cramped much like economy seats today.

The tight seating is noticeable when you enter the Museum's Concorde aircraft exhibited in the Aviation Pavilion. A passenger could pay much less, fly first-class in a Boeing 747, and sit in more comfortable seats that recline fully flat. You could even leave London on a normal seven-hour flight at night, sleep in a comfortably reclined, fully flat seat, and wake up in New York. The Concorde flew its last shoulder-to-shoulder seated passenger in 2003.

00:07:56

MS:     Two-thirds of airline's revenue comes from its first, business, and premium economy class seats and makes good business sense for the airlines to spread the comfort for those who will pay top dollar for it and cram cheaper economy seats together in order to make more room for the upper class seats.

The Museum's 747 aircraft exhibited in the Aviation Pavilion is the first 747 ever built, serial number 001. It first flew in 1969. This aircraft served as a test bit for the 747 systems improvements. Since there are no passenger seats in the Museum's aircraft, you could only imagine the cabins filled with 371 economy seats, 52 premium economy recliner seats, 78 business-class, flatbed seats with 180-degree recline, and 31 first-class seats with eight open suits with 180-degree recline. The economy seat pitch is 31 inches and the seat width is 18.2 inches.

If you enter the Museum's 787-8 Dreamliner on exhibit in the Aviation Pavilion, you may be impressed with its cool, blue, streamlined interior, integrating overhead luggage bins with an arch and curve to match the ceiling. Half of the airplane is filled with economy seats. Those seats are thinner and firmer, which saves space and weight. The seat pitch is relatively spacious, 32 inches, and the seats don't recline. Instead, the flat part you sit on slides forward and back. Perhaps the upside of this is you, not the passenger in front of you, determine how much open space you have in front of you. If you're lucky enough to fly the Polaris business-class, you will get a whopping 78-inch pitch and 22-inch wide seat that reclines to a flat 180 degrees. Honestly, I'm so used to allowing little or not room for free movement in my airline seat. I wouldn't know what to do with all that space.

00:10:14

MS:     While a comfortable-sized airline seat may see on the surface to be a trivial issue compared to what it takes to build an aircraft to fly at an altitude of 40,000 feet at a speed of 500 miles an hour in all sorts of bad weather and congested air traffic, still it would be nice. I'm Marva Semet.

[Music]

SM:     Thank you for joining me today on The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. You can see examples of some of the passenger planes Marva mentioned on your next visit to the Museum, including the Boeing model 80A, the first Boeing 747, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Learn more about all of this at our website, museumofflight.org/podcast. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with our episodes and rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. You can contact the show at podcast@museumofflight.org. Until next time, this is your host, Sean, saying we'll see you out there, folks.

Host: Sean Mobley
Producer: Justin Braegelmann
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Content Marketing Manager: Irene Jagla 

Contact us: podcast@museumofflight.org