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.
Host: Sean Mobley
Producer: Justin Braegelmann
Webmaster: Layne Benofsky
Content Marketing Manager: Irene Jagla
Contact us: podcast@museumofflight.org
