On a recent flight I found myself sitting next to a very large man. At some point I noticed the label on his jacket, which was inside out, and it said XXXL. That seemed about right. He was huge. He spent most of the flight asleep with his hood pulled over his head while I spent most of mine trying to work out how to sit without half my body hanging into the aisle. It turned into a fairly good demonstration of what happens when airline seat size and the size of the passenger sitting in it no longer match.
I had chosen the aisle seat, as I usually do, because it normally gives me a little more room to move. You can lean slightly into the aisle, stretch a leg when the trolley is not coming and generally feel less hemmed in. On this flight none of that helped because the bloke beside me extended well beyond the armrest and into my seat. I pulled my shoulders in, shifted my legs, leaned towards the aisle and did what people usually do in these situations. I tried to put up with it without making a scene.
Eventually I quietly mentioned the problem to one of the flight attendants. His solution was to lift the armrest on my aisle side so I could move further out. Think about that. The airline solved the problem of another passenger occupying part of my seat by moving part of me out of mine. For a good portion of the flight I had one bum cheek on the seat and the other hanging over the aisle. It was a pretty crap solution, although presumably easier than dealing with the actual problem.
Meanwhile, the bloke beside me was having a magnificent flight. Hood over his head, sleeping peacefully, seemingly without a care in the world. Every now and then I would move and accidentally bump him. The hood would slowly lift, he would look at me, then lower it again and go back to sleep. I was becoming increasingly agitated while he seemed completely relaxed. I was not intimidated by him. I was simply bloody uncomfortable and getting pissed off that his size had somehow become my problem.
The Airline Seat Lottery
I travel a lot, and getting on a plane has become a bit of a lottery. I nearly always choose an aisle seat and spend far too much time looking at the seat map as though there is some clever strategy that can improve my chances. Maybe the middle seat is still empty. Maybe there is a row further back with fewer people in it. Maybe I can stay away from the toilets or pay a bit more for some extra legroom. Then boarding starts and you watch people coming down the aisle, wondering who is going to stop at your row.
For some reason I never seem to get the tiny person who disappears into their seat and leaves half the armrest untouched. Maybe they are all sitting together somewhere else on the aircraft having a wonderful time. Most passengers are obviously no problem at all, but every so often somebody stops at your row who is simply too large for the seat they have been allocated. They sit down and immediately you know the next five or ten hours are going to be different.
I will admit something here. When that happens, I start judging them. Why aren’t you exercising? Why aren’t you managing your weight? Why are you eating more than you need? Have you just let yourself go? I can construct a fairly complete case against somebody I have never met before the seatbelt sign has gone off.
I know that is not particularly enlightened. There could be all sorts of reasons why someone is extremely large. Genetics, illness, medication, lifestyle, psychological problems, age, or simply eating too much food. I have no idea. If I see a very large person walking through an airport, I could not care less because their body has nothing to do with me. The situation changes when they sit beside me and occupy a significant part of the seat I paid for. I am now sitting differently because of their size, leaning into the aisle because of their size and spending several hours pressed against a stranger because there is not enough room for both of us.
That is where my sympathy starts competing with my irritation.
When Airline Seat Size Becomes Someone Else’s Problem
The basic problem is not complicated. An airline seat has a fixed width and a human body also has a width. If the body is considerably wider than the seat, the extra has to go somewhere. On an aircraft that normally means into the seat next door.
On a short flight you can probably live with it. On a long flight it can become bloody uncomfortable. You pull your arms in, twist your shoulder towards the aisle and angle your legs away from the other person. There is constant physical contact with somebody you have never met, and unless you fancy standing near the toilets for ten hours there is nowhere else to go.
I once sat beside another extremely large man whose breath was so foul that I am not exaggerating when I say it smelled as though something had died. Normally bad breath is unpleasant but manageable because you can turn away. This bloke was so large that his head was almost over my shoulder, so every time he breathed in my direction I found myself holding my breath until the air cleared.
He probably had no idea. Maybe nobody had ever told him. Maybe there was some medical reason for it. I do not know, but after several hours sitting almost underneath him, the cause was not particularly important to me. That is one of the strange things about air travel. You cram hundreds of strangers into a confined space and things that would normally be private suddenly start affecting everybody around them.
What makes the whole thing stranger is how obsessively airlines measure almost everything else. If your suitcase is overweight, they care. If your cabin bag is too large, they care. If you want another bag, more legroom or a particular seat, there is usually a price attached to it. Airlines have become extremely good at working out what space is worth when they are selling it to you.
Yet when somebody cannot fit inside the width of the seat they have bought, the problem seems to become remarkably vague. Often the person sitting beside them ends up absorbing the difference. In my case, the solution was apparently to lift the aisle armrest and move my arse into the aisle.
Surely we can do better than that.
Could AI Allocate Airline Seats Better?
This is where I started wondering whether artificial intelligence might actually be useful.
We keep hearing that AI is going to transform medicine, education, business and almost everything else. Fine. Give it a much more ordinary problem. Work out how to put differently shaped human beings into an aircraft without unnecessarily squashing them together.
When you book a flight, perhaps you could voluntarily enter a few basic physical measurements along with your normal seating preferences. Weight on its own would not tell you much because two people can weigh exactly the same and have completely different body shapes. Shoulder width, hip width and height would be more useful. You could also include whether you want an aisle or window, need more legroom or have a mobility issue.
Then let the system work through the seating options.
I do not mean putting a very large passenger beside a small passenger and deciding the maths now works because the smaller person can surrender some of their space. That just creates a more sophisticated version of the problem I started with. The point would be to match people with seats that actually suit them and avoid obvious combinations that make everybody uncomfortable.
This is basically human Tetris, except the pieces complain and want a gin and tonic.
The airline does not need to announce anybody’s measurements. Nobody needs a boarding pass saying 32C: wide arse, broad shoulders, fucked knees. The computer only needs enough information to make a better seating decision. Once it has allocated the seats, the measurements could be discarded.
There are privacy questions, obviously, but we already hand airlines an enormous amount of personal information. I would be comfortable giving a computer my shoulder width if there was a reasonable chance it stopped me spending the next fourteen hours wedged against somebody else’s armpit.
Airlines Need Wider Seats, Not Just More Legroom
AI cannot solve the problem if every seat is basically the same width. Airlines would also have to accept the rather obvious fact that different passengers need different kinds of space.
At the moment airlines love selling extra legroom. Economy Plus, Economy X, Extra Space or whatever name someone in marketing has invented for an extra few centimetres between your knees and the seat in front. That is useful if you are tall. It does absolutely nothing if your problem is width.
So why not have some wider economy seats as well? Put the long people in the long seats and the wide people in the wide seats.
You do not have to call them fat seats. Nobody needs that. Just build a small number of wider seats into the aircraft and make them available to people who need or want more width. A large person could use one. So could a bodybuilder with shoulders like a refrigerator, someone recovering from an injury or anybody else who wants more room.
Maybe aircraft could eventually have more flexible rows where three conventional seats can become two wider seats when required. I have no idea whether that works from an engineering or commercial point of view, and I am not pretending to be an aircraft designer. But I do know that putting hundreds of differently shaped people into almost identical seats and waiting until the doors close to discover who does not fit is hardly the pinnacle of human ingenuity.
Look, I get it. Nobody wants fat people being lined up at the departure gate and weighed or measured like livestock. That would be fucking awful. But pretending there is no physical problem does not solve it either. If somebody needs more than one seat’s worth of space, that additional space has to come from somewhere. At the moment it often comes from the person who happened to draw the short straw and sit beside them.
That is what airlines should fix. Not with some public humiliation exercise and not by making passengers fight it out over an armrest at 35,000 feet. Design different seats for different bodies, collect whatever information passengers are comfortable providing, and use the technology we now have to allocate the space more intelligently.
We have aircraft that can carry hundreds of people halfway around the world while they stream movies through the sky. We have AI capable of sorting through enormous numbers of variables in seconds. It should not be beyond us to work out how to seat people of different shapes and sizes without making one passenger give up part of the seat they paid for.
Because one bum cheek in the seat and one bum cheek in the aisle might technically get everybody airborne, but it is a stupid solution.
Of course I am dreaming, and my suggestions are floored. But wouldn’t it be great if airlines had seats for people of different sizes, and allocated them accordingly.