Redesigning the Economy Airline Seat | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning the Economy Airline Seat

fastcodesign.com

40 pointsohjeez36 comments

One of my least favorite aspects of airline seats is that it seems like the curvature is designed for someone of average height--which I totally get--but extraordinarily uncomfortable for people outside of that range. I'm looking at you, United economy regional planes. I'm 6'2", and the base of my skull lands exactly at a sharp, hard edge on those planes and leads to utter misery. I'm not sure how to fix that. Just bitching. This is the internet after all.

It's not comfortable for people who are less than average heighteither. The curvature make those people sit with the head cranked forward... one wonders who is actually in a pleasant position with airline seats.

You get to enjoy yourself at concerts, and society apparently prefers tall men. Appreciate what you do have in life, thats what I try to do (as someone closer to the other end of the scale by western standards at least).

We tall people also die sooner, require more back surgery, can't find clothes that fit, slouch to fit in. Tradeoffs. I'd be okay with being average.

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Being broad and preferring to not touch strangers, I lean away. So after a long flight, I'm generally in quite a bit of pain, more as I get older.

I've like the design proposals showing staggered seating.

Alternately, I kinda wish my culture (and myself) was okay with touching. Like soldiers packed into troop transports. Everyone's suffering the same, so they just accept it.

I found out the hard way the last left row on most planes has an inch less leg room, and the aisle seat has an inch less width... I had a last minute flight for work and was stuck in said seat... I'm 6'1" and fat... it was horrible... the person in front of my leaned back and popped my knee out of place. Not cool at all. Lots of people < 5'4" tall and < 105# that could have fit more than comfortably, but not one offer to switch.

> The contoured spine follows an ergonomic curve all the way up to the headrest, which the company claims allows for a more comfortable posture in the upright position. “Our back is more contoured than most, which places the head more naturally above the body to stop it falling forward,” Pearson says.

Why do airplane seats not place my head naturally above my body? I get a stiff neck when awake, and as for sleeping, they are like church pews - as if the airlines purposely want to make it uncomfortable. Is there a safety reason to push my head forward?

My guess would be to prevent whiplash. Some car headrests also force your head forward into a more active position for this reason.

I wonder what the crash rate of western airlines are at this point? For fatalities it is about 0/year. Maybe it is time to re-evaluate plane interiors for the trade-off between safety and comfort.

What you want is turbulence frequency and severity, not crash rate.

I suspect metrics like these are what primarily drive these kinds of decisions rather than crashes since actual crashes are super rare.

I remember reading years ago about a neat idea: airplane seats where the reclining control causes the seat pan to slide forward instead of the back leaning back, so that if you'd like to recline it's your knees that get smashed.

What ever happened to that? I've never seen it implemented anywhere.

Some airlines use these, such as ANA. They're much less comfortable than the traditional seats when you're trying to sleep though. On long-haul where everyone wants to sleep, it's preferable to have all the seats recline. You lose less knee space by someone reclining in front of you then sliding your seat forward.

> They're much less comfortable than the traditional seats when you're trying to sleep though.

For you, not the person behind whose knees you're crushing.

For everyone, except for the saps in the back row.

Airline seat pitch and recline is pretty well documented, and you can do research before you book your flight: https://www.seatguru.com/charts/generalcharts.php

If I'm going to be on a plane for a long time, I do research to find the right balance between comfort and price. Part of deciding on that comfort is whether or not I can recline the seat and whether the seat in front of me reclines. Part of my purchase is the ability to recline the seat for my comfort. If I'm going to be a long flight, I certainly don't want to sit upright the entire time because the person behind me didn't research whether or not that seat would be comfortable for them.

I don't ever remember my knees being affected, its just you get a backrest that feels inches from your face.

I was recently on a flight with Frontier that used similar, thin-profile seats. They were definitely less comfortable, but I really appreciated the sight lines. Plus, it felt like there was substantially more room between me and the next seat.

All in all, I felt like it was a good trade.

All of the Frontier planes are fitted with the thin-profile seats now. American Airlines is in process of retrofitting its planes similarly and calling it "Project Oasis."

Separately, that's an interesting insight you brought up that sight lines definitely increased passenger comfort in any given seat. Like sitting with your back to the wall in a restaurant, vs. facing the wall.

> All in all, I felt like it was a good trade.

Well, it's a good trade until Frontier decides to use that additional room to cram in more rows of seats. Which they will do, sooner or later. And then you'll have just as little leg room as before and a less comfortable seat. Gotta love the race to the bottom.

If airplane ticket search sites reported the seat dimensions (Google, you can do this. Do good?) and let you filter on them, then the airlines might have some motivation to have larger spaces for passengers. Since price is almost the only thing one can easily understand about the flight, that gets the focus. With my build I touch the seat in front of me on most seat configurations. I'd pay at least $20/hr for an extra inch.

This is also what is causing flight times to go up. Airlines are flying slower to save fuel and I bet only 1% of people know that.

Sight lines are bad when the airline has in-seat vidscreens blasting ads throughout the flight.

I wish the screens would default to off. I always see people just leave them on and pay no atttention to them. Most people probably don’t know how to turn them off either. Oh well.

I feel the thinner profile seats are cleaner, easier to clean.

Some of the older more porous designs feel like carpet to me, sponges for decades of other people's sweat, stank, spilled coffee. I hate it.

Why don't we have bunk style bed racks for international flights? I'd gladly take a sedative, crawl into my cubby hole and wake up at my destination 6-12 hours later with no recollection of time loss. Of course, some sort of health screening would be necessary to ride Anesthesiologist Airlines.

Safety regulations. Such designs usually can't be evacuated in a manner that is timely enough to meet requirements.

Safety first might not be a good rule to guide civilization by. It basically means doing nothing is the best path. Maybe safety third would work better?

Why can they get away with this design on sleeper trains then?

The willingness of design houses to be complicit in an assault on the passenger never ceases to amaze me.

None of these people would take the contract to design an ergonomic guillotine. Would they?

To be slightly less hyperbolic, some people might want to reflect on the role the FAA has in regulating seat density and some recent hints the passenger escape test is now felt to be unreal, and a bad test of real life risk.

Just put a bunch of Aeron chairs in an airplane! Done! Jokes aside, we've all sat in comfortable chairs and uncomfortable chairs, in airplanes or otherwise. What makes a chair comfortable? What's the most comfortable chair you've used?

I'd guess for economy the priorities will always be safety, mass, cost, and comfort. In that order (hopefully). So airline seats won't take cues from office chairs for a while.

I'm not sure where this ended up going, but there was some legal challenge claiming otherwise: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/31/case-incredib...

For me comfort is all about leg room and has nothing to do with the chairs themselves. I don't want my knees touching the chair in front of me. If better designed chairs means more leg room, then I'm more comfortable.

My dad actually can't fly economy on a certain SE Asian carrier - because the seat-to-back distance is shorter than his femur.

I just want two goddamned armrests so I don't have my elbows pinned to my ribs for a half dozen or a dozen hours. I'm an average-sized male and have no issues with legroom in economy; as long as I've got 1-2" in front of my knees I'm golden -- most seats provide more than that.

I'll rant about this until the cows come home; I can pay $39 to upgrade to slightly-more-legroom class, but all I really want is some armrests. Premium economy, fleetwide, nationwide, STAT. Currently the only real PE products are on international flights (from the US perspective).

A Miata textile driver's seat. It was like an egg cup perfectly shaped for me. It's very lightly padded, but the plastic is supportively shaped so that it's not a problem. The seat is sloped so you don't feel like you're going to slide out, and you stretch your legs out forward, with a foot rest to keep your knees at a comfortable angle. Someday I'll achieve my dream of using one as a desk chair.

I think they are solving the wrong problem. It's not the chair it's the space between them.

The space between chairs is not going to increase. It will remain at the narrowest flyers are willing to endure for cheaper flights. If the seat designer can claim some extra space, they will be used to cram more rows. That may lead to cheaper flights, but not more legroom in economy class.

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