tomvancouver

Why is it OK to squeeze a 6'4" guy into an HD seat, but an obese person is allowed to get the required width (2 seats) gratis (with a medical cert).
Many obese people have difficulty getting thin, I get that. No tall person can make themselves shorter.

A J seat is out of most people's price capability, and a preferred seat often doesn't have a significantly larger space anyway.

Dollars2Donuts

@adam.smith

BINGO. That was exactly the response I would have written if I had the time, the patience and the smarts.

I wanted to respond in a very similar manner, but I honestly just thought it was common sense. Everything you stated is just perfectly true.

As for engaging with anyone on the other side....my father told me once when I was young 'Son, you cannot argue with an idiot'. To this day that statement is still true....

Well played, sir.

24left

Um, they had a better lobby group. Only in Canada would the government declare obesity as a medical condition, thus forcing AC etc to cough up an extra seat (for which we all pay for indirectly). I won't even get into a debate over the actual numbers of those who have a metabolic condition that predisposes them to obesity, versus the rest of the population who might be mouse-potatoes and predisposed to snacks. (I'm fond of the model used by some U.S. airlines "If you take up 2 seats, you pay for 2 seats").

Sadly, as you said, the tall people cannot lose weight to lose height.

And those revenue managers who looked at the numbers and decided to remove a piece of fruit or a cracker, will certainly not make any allowances for this group.

For fun, someone should pull up the statistical charts for average height and weight of Canadians for each of the last 3 decades. People are getting taller and some others are getting fatter, but airline seats are getting smaller, and space between them has been reduced. Hmm.

Adam Smith

Thanks all for the kind words. I'll try to respond to the points raised subsequent to my initial post.

On the evacuation issue, Transport Canada, the FAA, etc have certified the HD layouts as safe and I have no basis on which to disagree with their assessment.

As for Stranger's co-worker, it's unfortunate, just as it's unfortunate that the CBC story guy got DVT, but these incidents are few and far between and, as I said above, DVT can be brought on by many factors, not just airplane travel.

People also die of heart attacks and other conditions on airplanes that, on the ground, might not be fatal given the ability to get to a hospital quickly. Those people might be saved if each plane had an ER with emergency physicians and nurses on board.

That's technically feasible, but airline customers don't demand it because the risk is extremely small. I would put DVT in the same basket - it's not like hundreds of people are dying of DVT induced by cramped seats every year. As Stanger pointed out, his co-worker died before they densified cabins, and as I pointed out earlier, you can get DVT while sitting in J or a anywhere else - the government could mandate planes be all-J and passengers on long flights might still get DVT.

I would also point out that with DVT, there are a lot more ways to try to prevent it than there are to prevent a heart attack or other medical conditions - walking around the cabin, stretching exercises, etc.

Regulating the seat pitch of every seat on every aircraft is therefore not a practical solution to DVT.

I'm not glorifying the free market in any way. I'm fully in favour of government regulation in many respects, including air safety. I'm very glad that pilot training, crew rest, aircraft construction, evacuation procedures and so on are regulated. I'm simply saying this particular point is not one that the government should regulate.

Your comments about "social costs" seem to relate mostly to negative externalities, i.e. costs to society that are not borne by the producer or the consumer of the good or service. In this case, there is no externality: the person negatively affected by tight seat pitch is the one who consumes the product, i.e. the passenger. There's no child labourer harmed by your seat pitch being 29" instead of 31", nor does that cramped seat result in toxic sludge being dumped in a river somewhere.

You're correct that regulations that protect even small groups of people can be justified. But regulations also need to take into account costs and practicality. In this case, regulating seat pitch in every seat, in every aircraft, is like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. For example, when the Supreme Court said that AC couldn't force obese people to buy a second seat if they didn't fit in one, they didn't require AC to give free upgrades to J to people over a certain weight or girth or redesign all seats to accommodate someone weighing 700 lbs. AC is allowed to impose certain operational limitations and require advance notice to accommodate those people (see here for details of AC's policy, if interested), and only in cases where it's medically necessary.

So, if we were to regulate something in order to deal with DVT, there should be a similarly targeted policy in place - people who are at high risk for DVT for one reason or another should get a note from a doctor and AC can give them a preferred seat at no extra charge, or something like that.

But to mandate a minimum seat pitch across all aircraft is not a practical solution to that problem.

Before introducing any regulation, in this case or any other, it should also be studied and evaluated. For instance, if data were collected and if 20% of seats on planes are J and 80% are Y, and 20% of aviation-related DVT cases are from J passengers, that would suggest that DVT is not strongly related to being in a seat with tighter pitch. In that case, it would make no sense to impose any regulation.

At this time, there are no significant studies suggesting that seat pitch has anything to do with DVT (the president of Thrombosis Canada admits in the CBC story it's a poorly studied issue). Flying is not one of the top risk factors listed by medical experts on DVT. Many people - children, many women, some men - aren't really impacted by HD seating since their legs still aren't near the seat in front of them.

If someone actually does some solid research on this point and demonstrates a strong link between DVT and seat pitch, I'll be the first to agree that we should be looking at regulation.

Until then, it's premature to have all these people on this board, and the CBC story, bemoaning tighter seat pitch, suggesting that it's a major health risk for DVT, and then calling for the regulation of seat pitch to solve the "problem".

That's a very valid point, and in fact, I agree with you. I'd be happy to join you in taking the case to court to try to get us free preferred seats or something like that.

But as I said above in my response to Ber2dca, if we were to get a concession on this front, it should be targeted - e.g. people over 6'2" get free preferred seats. But there's no reason a small child or a 4'11" grandmother can't sit in a seat with rouge pitch just because you and I don't fit in those seats.

As for preferred seats, I disagree. I notice a huge jump going from preferred to non-preferred seats. In fact, I got stuck in a non-preferred seat on some AC flight last year and was shocked at how much more uncomfortable it was.

televisor

Looking at the link between flying and DVT is a bit disingenuous (i.e. what proportion of DVT is directly flight related) - people might be more predisposed to DVT through other factors, and most people don't fly much, so those factors affect the total number of cases much more. You'd really have to look at whether the incidence of DVT is higher in those who fly than those who don't fly to see whether flying is really linked to DVT. As mentioned above this hasn't really been studied, so it's not really fair to make claims either way.

The Lev

I believe preferred seats typically have 35-36" pitch or far greater at exits and bulkheads of widebodies. While that may not seem like much, it is say 4" more than normal (if not unlimited).

The critical constraint in terms of fitting in a seat is the distance between the buttocks and the knee. As people get taller, their growth generally remains proportional. Broadly speaking, four areas get bigger:

• Head/neck
• Torso
• Thigh
• Shin/feet

Only one of those four is impacted by seat pitch - the length of the thigh. The torso will elongate the most followed by the thigh. I'm 6' tall and can fit reasonably comfortably in a regular pitch seat. Even if we assume that the thigh length grows at 1/3 of the total growth in height, that means that a 7' person should be as comfortable in a limited preferred seat as I am in a regular seat.

tomvancouver

Good point. 4" is a lot when it comes to knee space.
I thought non bulkhead preferred seats on many narrowbodies (319, 321, but not most widebodies, according to Seat Guru) typically have the same pitch as non-preferred?

As has been noted by others, being cramped on a LCC for a 2 hour European flight is one thing, but for a 5 hour transcon or 8 hour TATL is a very different experience.

joer1212

I'm no fan of lawsuits, but I'll make an exception in this case. Maybe that's the only language the airlines will understand.

YOWgary

I'm interested by how many users we don't often see that have joined this thread.

Either someone's running like 6-8 alts, or this issue's a real lightning rod.

Dollars2Donuts

Interesting pseudo-theory. And as funny as it is, I wouldn't doubt it....and I think we can figure out what side of the argument is stacking the deck in their favour.

Jumper Jack

Right.

Don't be mad, but I think this is a indeed a serious, real issue. What is the line?(Is there a line?)

payam81

Thankfully the obese disability policy is only applied for flights whit in Canada. It's one of the most stupid policies the previous government came up with as it actually harms other, legitimate disabled people who require the care of a companion to travel with them. Now they have to fight it out with the fat guys over the extra seat.

There should be a difference between disability by choice and disability by no choice.

HerpaYvr

..Being vertically challenged, I am simply jealous of all of the "tall people" issues

eigenvector

Great post by adam.smith. Although the response is very well reasoned and I agree with many of the points made (particularly with respect to causality of DVT), there is one thing I want to respond to.

You wrote:
I largely agree with your reasoning up to this point, but here I must disagree. I can't speak for others in this thread, but I am not looking for Air Canada to abandon its profits. I do not see this issue as AC simply delivering what the customer wants. Rather I see it as poor management at AC misjudging the market and prioritizing short term profits without any interest in exploring what the customer wants or is willing to pay for. Why do I say this? Well, there are many other carriers trying to serve the same markets and same customers as AC. And as far as I can tell, being simply a traveler and not an industry analyst, most other carriers are not following the same strategy as AC.

Of all major international carriers, AC is the one that is most aggressively increasing density in long-haul Y. Meanwhile, direct competitors such as AA, UA, and DL are investing hundreds of millions if not billions in retrofitting planes to provide large sections of seats that are exactly what many on this thread are asking for, and many are claiming no one will pay for: a little more space, for a little more money. I am not asking for a freebie from the government. I am asking for AC to follow its competitors in giving me the choice to buy something between HD Y for $700 and PY for $2000.

Some posters on this thread strenuously claim that these options exist on AC but they do not, not in long haul markets and not in sufficient quantity and consistency to make them viable. And honestly, I try very hard to stay away from personal remarks on here, and this is not directed specifically at you adam.smith, but nearly everyone making the argument that enough Y options already exist also states that they only fly J. So be real here guys, you have no idea what the long-haul Y options in the marketplace are because you don't fly Y. That's fine, but don't pretend that you're up to date on the latest 787-9 Y seat from NH (etc.), because you certainly are not.

I don't think there is any conflict between AC maximizing its profits and people having comfortable, affordable options in Y. I base this not on my own uneducated conjecture but on what other major international carriers are doing, who I presume to have equal or greater resources as AC to perform market research as well as equal or greater actual customer data from their own operations.

So where I diverge from you, adam.smith, is in your belief that AC simply offers what the market wants and therefore if people show demand for something else that AC will respond. From here some other posters reason (circularly) that since AC has not responded with larger seats, there is no demand. But there is a hidden assumption here: that AC is actually competently and accurately responding to customer preferences - that the market is in a static, perfectly optimized equilibrium where AC's offering is precisely what the customer wants.

AC has chosen a strategy of racing to the bottom on comfort while providing no other alternative that is within the Y customer's budget while other carriers believe they can simultaneously make room in the marketplace for a "Y+" (not PY) product. I believe AC has taken the wrong direction here and it's not because I don't believe in free market economies. I don't think they're sadists, but I don't think they're perfect market optimizers either, because nobody is, and their competitors seem to know something they don't.

Based on your username, you likely know economics better than I do. So you know that there are a multitude of possible strategies in terms of seating configuration that an airline can pursue to find the profit-maximizing mix of product offerings and prices. The fact that one choice (increasing density) increases profits does not mean that is the best or only way to increase profits, and thus it shouldn't be held as a sacred example of the free market at work.

Jumper Jack

I am in the process of writing a long form medium post regarding what Y class has to become and where I think we will go from here. (I will probably post here when I am done)

However, Feels the need to address few things.
1. AC never offered a REAL option unlike AA(and likely future UA), it was HD Y or PY(Which the price difference can be in the thousands on TPAC)
2. Feels like certain members live in the reality distortion field, maybe years of J have made them this way, I guess. Without realizing how they just proved they are tangled in their own entitlement paradox.
3. Someone have OPed that some of NTSB regulation is written in "blood", AKA, certain safety changes for the better ONLY occurred after accidents where loss of life or significant loss of life has occurred. I hope I am proved wrong regarding any of my skepticism in 777HD's evacuation process that may or may not be unfounded. But my solution is I am always ensuring I am only 1-2 rows away from emergency exit when I am not in PY(Aka non YYZ-YVR routes). I begin doing this every time I fly HD in Y. I have seen many slightly larger body pax has to move sideways in the new aisle that appears to be smaller than before(Though, no I did not bring a ruler to measure the difference)- and again there is no real evidence of HD's evaluation issue other than my own skepticism.(Aka IMO)
4. I will ignore any argument such that all "Pay for PY or J or you are entitled talk"

How hard is it to understand it is AC's pure, shameless greed to not have any options of economy plus. (They can shove those even more uncomfortable "preferred" seats up their butt for all I care) How anyone can even flip it as entitlement need serious help. AC is the ONLY North American legacy carrier who do not have real economy plus installed on their aircraft.
The creation of PY and its sole existence is in an effort to make a lower class product so awful so some will pay much more than what they had before to a new class.
5. Thankfully I live in Canada where most Canadians are not complete right wing nuts. I thought I had read every craze things there can be said on FT until I saw the privatized healthcare. As if the complete trainwreck does not exist south of the border(Please don't even try to combat this if you are an extremely well paid pro) because guess what, poor people exist and they are people too (Sarcastic Gasp). In before, they deserve to die because they paid little comments.
6. I studied enough to see what mass government deregulation have done the poorest, weakest population and I am enraged by some of the senseless entitlements from certain members, while I strongly disagree with Adam Smith, SAP etc on some of their points,but I still respect them as posters because they can atleast see somewhat to the two sides of argument. However, Certain members commentary is beyond sickening and display a shocking lack of humanity.