Hey knee cappers. You are in the news!
http://tinyurl.com/lz7wgpt

I never open tinyurls. No Idea where I'm going or if it's safe. Please provide a real link.

Relax AJ, nobody is trying to spam you. The link is to a NYT article.

If no typos when posted, but I can't know that.

People used to fuss at you on Fodors when you DIDN'T use tiny url.

I also share AJPeabody's concern. There are spam links at this forum even though they usually have a short half-life before being triangled. Knowing whether a poster posts spam links knowingly or not requires knowledge of the poster, which takes time to develop. Also one must get familiar with this forum to know how to look at the posting history.

Well, I had previously read the article referenced, and it was interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/bu...anted=all&_r=0

But why have reclining seats at all when using that feature is considered an act of territorial aggression?

Off topic, but I quite like using the preview links from tinyurl
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ngp9ayw

which will take you to the tinyurl page and give you the full url.
(the one above is this page)

As long as people keep putting price as their number one priority, space will always be a problem in C (cattle) class.

When I look at buying a ticket, one of the things I always look at is the 'seat pitch'. If it is less than 32", I'm not buying no matter what the price is.

Some airlines are now down to 28" as the article points out.

I already had read that article in real life, on paper. It looks like Gresham's Law is now applying to airline seats: Bad seats are driving out good. First to go was American's extra room for every coach seat, and now what's disappearing is any space for every every seat, except for premium coach, which is what coach used to be. How many deep vein thromboses and pulmonary emboli will it take to reverse the trend?

AJPeabody, I'm no economist, but I thought Gresham's law required people to hoard the 'good stuff' so that only the 'bad' stuff would stay in circulation (?) But people aren't hoarding better quality seats, they can't even buy them at all in the economy cabin - at least, not on most routes. Air Canada now has "premium economy" seats - but only on a very few routes.

Part of the problem is that planes come in fixed sizes, and each plane must have its own crew, landing slot, etc. One can't just add on cars to a plane the way one can on a train to accommodate more passengers. If one has 200 people seeking to fly a route that formerly serviced on average only 160 people, then the 'solution' of flying two planes (100 people per plane) means the airline's cost DOUBLES, for an increase in revenue of only 25 per cent. Airlines run thin profit margins (I know, hard to believe) so this arrangement would see them either running at a loss (nope, CEO would be sacked) or having to increase fares as much as a third - far more than their customers would tolerate.

So they rearrange the seating and squeeze in 25 per cent more people. People complain, but they still buy the tickets.

At some point of course the airline cannot accommodate more people on a given size plane and they either start flying a different plane model on that route, or they fly two planes. But the math has to work out to keep the airline in the black, not the red.

Actually, they'd have to increase the fares in the above example by 60 per cent, to keep the same revenue per plane as before. Sorry about that.