Still A Pain In The Butt: Southwest's New, "Wider" Seats Won't Be Noticeably ... - Forbes

Seven-tenths of one inch.

That’s about the width of my name (in bold) under my photo near the top of this webpage. Now you need to ask yourself whether that tiny bit of additional space will be enough to make your butt happy?

I don’t know about your’s, but I doubt my rather ample butt will be any happier in a year or two when I first wedge it into one of the new seats on Southwest Airlines Southwest Airlines’ newest planes coming from Boeing Boeing. The first 737 -800 to be equipped with the new, wider seats isn’t expected to enter service at Southwest until the middle of next year. Southwest’s first 737– MAX won’t enter service until 2019.

So give Southwest, which has a well-deserved reputation for ginning up lots of positive hype about relatively small things, credit for scoring dozens and dozens of big headlines and lots of time on high-profile TV newscasts last week with the unveiling of its new seats. But remember, they call it “hype” for a reason.

SOUTHWEST REPORTS FIRST QUARTER EARNINGS TODAY

The truth of the matter is that not only will it be some considerable time before you can plant your bottom in one of Southwest’s new seats, when you finally do your bottom probably won’t notice the difference. There are several reasons why:

• The differences in seat cushion width are miniscule. Chances are you aren’t aware – or at least weren’t until last week – that not all airlines’ coach seats are the same width. According to data compiled by SeatGuru.com Southwest’s current seats, at around 17.1 inches, on average, are a little narrower than American’s average domestic coach seats, and very close to the same width as most of Delta’s and United’s. But the differences among any of them are so small that they essentially are meaningless.  In fact, once Southwest goes up to 17.8 inches wide, American’s seats will still be, at least on some planes, slightly wider. That alone takes the wind out of Southwest’s seat announcement sails. But the bigger story is that the differences will remain largely unnoticeable.
• Seat rows still will be the same width.  The width of the three seats supported by a single frame that makes up a seat row will not be any wider. Thus, only the width of the padded cushion in each of the three seats is being widened. Widening the entire row is almost impossible because the plane’s fuselage width is unchangeable, and the aisle must be kept wide enough for passenger loading and unloading (especially during an emergency). Because the seat row unit’s width won’t change,  if you’re going to make wider cushions the distance between those cushions must be reduced. So chances are you’ll still be rubbing derrieres with the stranger next to you, perhaps even a little more so than today.
• Your hiney likely isn’t even the widest part of your body. For most men, and many women, their shoulders – or perhaps their bulging biceps sticking out just below the points  of the shoulders – are the widest parts of their bodies. That means that while many airline passengers’ backsides slip between the arm rests with room to spare, they still have to sit with a slightly twisted upper body position to keep from knocking shoulders with the muscle bound dude next to them. Then there’s those, like me (sadly), whose shoulders aren’t the widest part of our bodies either; it’s our elbows, which have to flare out a bit to accommodate the XXL bellies positioned prominently between them. So armrest wars likely will only escalate with the new Southwest seats. To accommodate the wider cushions, the armrests are being shrunk. A quarter and a nickel can be laid side-by side on today’s models. The new armrest has room for only the quarter.
• Seat width isn’t even the most important factor in economy class passenger comfort. Shoulder – or elbow – width is more important, as noted. Factors such as folding tray clearance, available storage space, the placement of individual Air Conditioning controls and reading lights, and the availability and quality of in-flight entertainment units and charging ports for cell phones and other portable tech items are just as, or more important in terms of passengers’ perception of comfort. And most important of all is pitch, which is defined as the distance from any point on a seat to the exact same point on the seat ahead or behind.

About 25 years ago I wrote a feature story looking back to the late 1950s and early 1960s and  how engineers, designers and market planners for Boeing and its airline customers decided what the optimum number of seats would be on the new jet-powered planes that were then entering service. Teams of planners and designers researched many subjects related to human anatomy and ergonomics, tastes, cultural preferences, behavior, etc. One of the key areas of study involved going to all sorts of public places where people gather  together in a seated environment – movie theatres, auditoriums, churches and sports stadiums.

That research led them to conclude that the “most uncomfortable stadium in America” at the time was the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The reason: a painfully tight seating pitch of 31 inches, compounded by a steep design that placed the tops of chair-backs (or, in the case of the bleacher sections, fans’ shoulder blades precisely where they would grind into the shins of virtually any adult sitting in the chair behind. The designers and planners agreed, at least at that time, that coach class pitch should be at least 33 or 34 inches – and that no seat rows should ever be placed as close together as 31 inches.

Well, we long ago blew through that 33 inches barrier so that carriers could add another couple of rows to each plane. And now we are largely at the Cotton Bowl level of seating discomfort on most domestic flights in the United States. On some flights aboard ultra-low cost carrier Spirit Airlines Spirit Airlines – and a few  others – the pitch is (if you’re tall, like me) a painful-to-even-think-about 28 inches.

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