Airbus's A321: 141 Economy Seats in sets of 3x, or 23 rows on each side of the aircraft. 31" pitch.
If we take out one row of 3x seats, that's 1.34 inches of additional pitch, if we take out two, that basically turns it into Delta's Economy Comfort (34" pitch). So how much is six seats going to cost?
I grabbed a random Atlanta -> New Orleans on an A321, total one way ticket cost for 6x tickets is $561. If we split that between all the remaining 21 rows/63 seats on one side of the aircraft, that is $9/seat.
For $9/seat we could all be sitting in economy comfort. Based on $93.5 one way, that is less than 9% surcharge.
Heck, sell one side of the aircraft at 34" pitch and $9 more, and the other at 31" pitch and $9 cheaper. Everyone wins.
I'd pay $9 more. I cannot afford to pay $405 which is the cost of business class by the way.
PS - These are back of napkin figures, not an academic study. Take with a pinch of salt.
It also reduces stress on boarding, reduces some fees the airline pays, and while staffing cost per passenger increases, the airline's profit per passenger increases in kind.
Plus a lot of airlines don't even offer an Economy comfort class, and even fewer do on all of their aircraft.
The biggest likely impediment to this isn't the economics or business, it is that reseller sites only focus on price. They won't even tell you what the seat pitch/width is, they'll just tell you that seat A is $135 and seat B is $150.
Of course, the real thing is that customers are voting with their wallets, and they generally prefer as cheap as possible.
Anyway, he's been complaining a lot about sitting in the back seat of our car. The car in question, a Model S, is, as I understand it, known to have fairly good back seat legroom, and we don't ride with the front seats far back.
The point is this: in so many ways, it's fucking glorious to be short.
I can sit on Caltrain or a jetliner and work fairly comfortably with my laptop. That's an epic, life-long advantage.
In trade? Well, I have to ask my wife or son to get things down from the top shelf.
Totally worth it.
The contribution of tall mothers to height in sons is deceptively large, because women are quite short compared to men. Using your figures and some stylized assumptions:
American mean male height 70 inches.
American mean female height 66 inches.
Father 67 inches = 70-3
Mother 70 inches = 66+4
Heritability of height 0.8
Expected value of son's height is (70) + ((-3+4)/2)*0.8, or 70.4 inches, taller than either parent.
Reversing the heights of the parents gives the same result for the son (it's a substitution of (0+1) for (-3+4)), but people are much less surprised by a son who's slightly taller than his average father than they are by a son who's much taller than his father and even taller than his very tall mother.
I've never encountered anything worse than the back seat of a 4th gen Altima. Something about it it just nauseating Given a choice between an old pickup with no AC and manual steering in the summer and rear seat of a 4th gen Altima I'd take the truck almost every time.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/health/obesity-study-10-p...
Or when, like happened to me, you get involuntarily relocated from the exit row seat you paid extra for? (Without compensation, since it was done by the flight crew during boarding and not in advance. Thanks, Singapore Airlines!)
It's fantastic, all airlines should introduce it.
The end result is the same either way for the person in front me, so I feel no guilt in using them. I also make a point to never recline my own chair.
I'm tall enough that in coach my knees make full contact with the seat in front. I just keep them that way for the first half of the flight, and the person in front of me assumes the seat recline is broken.
And if they manage to recline anyway, I make sure to hold my food or drink or reading material directly above their head while I eat, since they're pretty much in my lap anyway.