Originally Posted by
FWAAA
AA's crummy angled-flat seats recline to 180 degrees and make a flat surface, albeit one that is angled about nine degrees away from horizontal. Barney Gimbel then subtracted that nine degrees to arrive at the ignorant (and factually incorrect) conclusion that AA's seats recline to only 171 degrees.
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The NW seats, on the other hand, did not recline a full 180 degrees, rather they reclined to 176 degrees.
The difference between 176 degrees and 180 degrees on a padded seat isn't visible. So I'm sticking to published references here, and I can find none that refer to AA's seat as 180 degrees, and a
lot of references to them reclining to 171 degrees. If you'd like to provide a counter-reference I'd be happy to admit I'm wrong.
Regardless, it's losing sight of the initial point, which is that AA wasn't breaking any particularly new ground with its seats in 2006. They rolled out -- to use your term -- "crummy angle flat seats," when several other US carriers already had angle flat seats, and European carriers had actual flat beds. At the time, their PR people admitted openly that they'd considered fully flat seats but "We'd lose a whole row of seats if we went completely flat." The WSJ at the time opined that "
American couldn't wait any longer to place its new-seat wager."
The American of 2006 was not an airline that was innovating; it was an airline that was grudgingly catching up, and doing so on the cheap.