Could the airlines help us a bit on this issue?

"We are starting our meal service and respectfully ask you to bing your seat back forward until we complete removal of service items.

Global services please bring your seat back forward now...

Now 1Ks......

Now plats......

1. OP should not have reclined. During boarding, it's a nuisance.

2. The guy behind OP should have been tossed off the aircraft. He could have asked OP and then complained to the FA. But, kicking the seat? Nyet.

3. I've never heard of any rule that suggests that one can't recline after take off. I do and I do it slowly (as always).

I'm with the majority.

Reclining during boarding is inconsiderate.

Kicking the seat in front of you is rude.

Once the wheels leave the ground, it's OK to recline if you want to.

During mean service, seat back up, even if you don't plan to eat. It's just common courtesy. That does not apply to soda/nuts service, only real meal service.

If you are so tall that having the seat in front of you recline is a problem, make sure you get a seat that accommodates your unusual requirement or grin and bear it.

One thing I like a lot about the newer AA 738 F seats is that the seat slides forward as the back reclines. The upshot is that it is at least as comfortable as the standard recline-only seats, yet even when fully reclined doesn't intrude nearly as much on the next passenger back as the standard seats. Makes it easier to eat, use a laptop and simply enjoy the flight. And at 6'2", I don't feel that my legroom is restricted by this slide-forward configuration.

I don't know whether any Y or other airlines' F cabins have this, but it seems like a good approach to ameliorating or even eliminating the tension over the reclining seat.

I always recline the seat briefly (and then, normally, immediately bring it back to vertical) when I first sit down, to check for a broken seat -- plus to have a definite answer that it isn't broken on the rare occasion you get someone intentionally blocking the recline (whether using a device or just their knees.)

I don't normally bring it down on the ground, although I have during extended ground delays. I've twice been caught on board a plane for hours during WX delays (once at SFO in AA domestic F, once in HKG in CX J) and being able to recline made a huge difference in my ability to sleep through them.

Having been in an flight with a mechanical failure that required an immediate go-around to the gate (although it was something where we could get back to a gate, and not an evacuation) I always wait for the 10,000 feet ding to recline and take my shoes off. I figure if something were to go wrong which would bring us back to the ground quickly (but in one piece) it would have happened by then.

The AA 738 F seats are a particularly nice implementation of this; the 738 Y seats do it too, a bit less nicely. The fairly recent, but now outgoing CX Y "shell" seats do, but rather badly (these have a different point of articulation.)

I was sitting in J on AA 10 LAX-JFK (the 9:30 PM departure) a couple of months ago. I really wanted to sleep during the flight and popped an Ambien just after boarding. We unfortunately had a bit of a delay, and after dozing off, I woke up in a slight haze and made the mistake of reclining my seat to get more comfortable. It turns out that we were still on the ground, and my recline was met by a swift kick to the back of my seat from the passenger behind me who shouted, "It's meant to be up!" in a British or possibly Australian accent (I can usually tell, but was a bit out of it :p) that was loud enough for the entire cabin to hear.

I was shocked and have never directly experienced that type of aggressive behavior from a fellow passenger before. I likely would have responded somehow under normal circumstances, but really wasn't in the mood, so I just kept my seat upright and eventually reclined for the rest of the flight once we were finally in the air (without any further issues).

I can't imagine ever just shoving the back of someone's seat like this guy did, regardless of who was right or wrong. I would always attempt to ask politely and then speak to an FA if there were truly an issue.

Yeah. I can't imagine kicking or shoving the seat in front of me but I have pointed to it as a FA walked by before, to get them to tell the jerk to raise it. Of course, I assume that somebody that has their seat reclined during take off or landing is a jerk but I suppose it could be somebody like metallo, just in an ambien fog. I've had to get waked up before to put my seatback up for landing, even without ambien. I'm an incurable airline sleeper. I sometimes fall asleep before pushback and wake up to the sound of tires chirping on the runway. If the taxi in is long, I sometimes fall back asleep. I don't know why. It's some kind of escape mechanism. I spend way too many hours of my life in an airline seat and sleeping is preferable to staring at the seatback in front of me or the tops of clouds below me. I try to read or work sometimes but the drone of the engines and the immobility usually wins out.