Originally Posted by
tacommuter
I suppose the advantage of being in the middle is that you have a better chance that one of the two people trapping you may not be asleep for the duration of the flight. But on the other hand, a middle seat is a middle seat. There is nowhere to even lean away from the strangers next to you. Heck - where do you even turn your heard to sneeze (which I do a great deal of on planes)?
All of this would work fine, of course, if there were more couples or family groups traveling in Business, and they consistently chose the obvious 2's and 3's to sit together. Has anyone ever seen any statistics, however, on what the percentage of solo travelers versus couples actually is? On my typical international routes, it does seem that the vast majority are single business travelers - leading to the problem with no one wanting a window.
I have flown in the middle seat on UA's 2-3-2 J on their old configuration 744.
Honestly, it wasn't that bad. Whenever anyone thinks of middle seat I think they inevitably imagine a middle seat in Y, which--of course--is awful.
In J you have so much more space, there is simply no comparison. You don't share armrests, nobody is leaning into you (which is basically physically impossible).
I compared it to a window seat in J (in a layout where there are 2 seat by the window) but in some ways, believe or not, I actually prefer the middle seat of a 2-3-2 to this window seat, because you have a much greater sense of openness and space.
Ultimately, the best J layout is something like 1-2-1, where none of this is ever an issue; of course 1-2-1 is simply not possible on every plane.