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A man had deployed a “knee defender,” an obnoxious device that prevents the seat in front from going back. Several airlines, United included, ban this contraption, but the man refused to remove it. The woman sitting in front of him then threw a cup of water at him. Both were thrown off the plane in Chicago.

In a more peaceful scenario, the man would have removed that stupid device when asked. The woman could have found her inner Zen voice telling her to move aside when someone acts like a jerk. Neither took the high road, so a planeload of passengers — most also scrunched into child-sized leg space — was greatly inconvenienced.


There are already market solutions, of a kind. Many airlines now sell enhanced space for, say, 30-odd bucks more. (That the combative passengers had both paid for extra square inches may have made them feel doubly aggrieved.)


Sure enough, the average space between seats has fallen from around 34 inches before 2001 to about 31 inches now. Seats are themselves getting slimmer, and more are being tacked on to the rows.

A moment of respectful silence for flight attendants, please.

What can passengers do about this?

Ben Baldanza, the chief executive of no-frills Spirit Airlines, offers this blunt advice: “You don’t get a Mercedes S-Class for a Ford Fusion price. If you want more legroom, go pay for it at another airline.”



The answer is that Americans have been trained to buy stuff on the basis of price only. Go ask for flight information on Expedia, a travel website. Up comes a list of options that one can sort by departure time, arrival time, duration or price. The default is “price.”

Nowhere are there data on breathing room or other niceties. Yet if personal space matters more to many travelers than the lowest price, why isn’t that information part of the sorting process?


But the shrinking of comfort levels accelerated decades later. It happened without a middle-class revolt, in part because our price-obsessed culture has dropped quality — whether for a sweater or for a flight to Hawaii — as a major factor in making a purchase.



Photo: Douglas Paul Perkins via Wikimedia Commons



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