Passengers are being squeezed by other customers of size. Large passengers who don’t fit into their seats, or spill over armrests, are encroaching on space that doesn’t belong to them.

There are basically two reasons for this:

• Americans have gotten larger We take up more space, and encroach into the space of other passengers. Critics also often point to seats having less width, but that’s not true for most domestic flights. Boeing 737s and Airbus A320 family aircraft have the same basic fuselage they always have. Airlines do tend to squeeze an extra seat in each row of widebody aircraft like Boeing 777s and Boeing 787s, however.

  

• Planes have gotten more full. It used to be common to have an empty middle seat next to you, because one-third of seats flew empty. That’s no longer true, as airlines have consolidated, become better at constraining capacity (and airports and air traffic control just don’t have the ability to expand as demand has grown), and so we don’t get extra room we didn’t expressly buy.

It’s generally against airline policy. Passengers are supposed to buy the amount of space that they need to fit, whether that’s a first class seat or two coach seats. Southwest Airlines is even famous for providing that extra space complimentary. However these rules are rarely enforced.

• There are fewer gate agents to be vigilant about it. Flights that aren’t full often only have a single agent to board them, and they’re responsible for customer service and boarding; gate checking bags; adjusting seat assignments; and often processing last minute standbys and upgrades. Often watching for drunk passengers slips by, while they’re expected to enforce oversized carry-on rules and basic economy rules.

• Speaking up risks on-time departures. Dealing with a contentious customer service issue like calling out someone’s weight, right at the last minute prior to departure, can delay a flight – and that’s something that the agent may get reprimanded over. There’s little benefit to the agent in enforcing a ‘customer of size’ policy. It’s far easier to offload the problem onto the passengers seated beside them.

• Cultural norms make it uncomfortable and besides the standards for exactly how large is too large can be unclear. So it really puts an agent on the spot to call out a customer like that – one who is going to complain, create trouble for the airline, and potentially even sue.

“Big Curvy Olivia” thinks it is discrimination that aircraft aisles are so narrow, and posts video of herself struggling to get through a United Airlines Polaris business class cabin. But widened aisles would mean even less room for seats!

Lol and the First Class cabin has much more space than economy pic.twitter.com/YCAh501hF3

— Ben Kew 🏌️‍♂️ (@ben_kew) May 18, 2023

I actually think there’s an even bigger problem here, and it’s a failure at the top levels of airline management. Airlines will sell you the amount of space that you wish to buy. Some people buy less than they need, and that imposes costs on seatmates rather than the airline. And with flights full, there’s often little that can be done (without a passenger changing flights).

Airlines make the process too hard – transaction costs are too high, when they don’t need to be! A larger passenger who wants to buy that extra seat has a hard time doing so.

• Most airlines will sell you an extra seat if you want to buy one but the process can be convoluted, agents don’t know how to sell them, and gate agents don’t always know how to save them from being taken by another passenger.

• PlusGrade sells a solution for airlines to offer extra seats for sale in the booking path. Yet airlines don’t take advantage of marketing the option, losing real revenue in the process.

• United Airlines actually makes it simple to buy an extra seat yet nobody seems to even know this is an option.

  Extra Seat for “Personal Comfort”
  byu/PurplestPanda inunitedairlines

Because transaction costs are too high, fewer people that should buy an extra seat buy the seat. And because it falls on gate agents and flight attendants to deal with, and they’re least-well equipped to do so, it ends up that the costs fall entirely on unrelated passengers who happen to be seated next to someone that doesn’t fit in their seat. That’s unfair, and bad business for the airline which is giving up revenue.

Some ‘plus-sized influencers’ think that airlines should just give them extra space for free, the way that Southwest has done, but that means amortizing the cost of a flight across fewer passengers and a need to generate higher revenue from each one. That’s just another form of cost-shifting – higher fares- albeit less directly than a single passenger stealing space from the passenger next to them because they don’t fit.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jaelynn Chaney (@jaebaeproductions)

I do wonder, though, whether if airlines don’t solve this Ozempic will? As GLP-1 drugs mature and price comes down, they’ll become more accessible, and far fewer people will need larger seats. At the same time, that’ll save airlines fuel expense since there’s less mass to transport. But it also means an opportunity to shrink seats even further, if they can get that past FAA regulators who require airlines to meet evacuation standards. With more seats, will they be able to evacuate the aircraft in 90 seconds? Maybe if each passenger loses weight and moves faster!

In the meantime, though, the best you can do is probably complain to the Department of Transportation when airlines fail to follow their own policies requiring passengers to purchase sufficient space for themselves.