I agree with the sentiment but perhaps not the execution–mandatory preboard bong rips for everyone. Let’s just all chill out 
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Why not have Hot Box flights?
free chips served in flight
They also decided to lower prices by 50% since 1980. During the golden age of air travel, most people were not traveling at all: only 20% of people in 1958 had ever been on an airplane.
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Or choose a seat in the front of the cabin?
You can even get paid to sit up there! Although I hear they expect you to do some work occasionally.
If you’re on an Airbus you even have a nice tray for your laptop that people can’t recline their seats into.
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On this layout,
Row 19.
Though it probably goes rather quickly, and is usually sold as “Economy Plus”.
I had that seat once on a 777 (something like 26H here). Most leg room ever (and as @Medievalist points out) since it was a BA flight, lots of free booze.
On the downside, everyone hangs out there waiting for the toilet, and as a short-arse, you have to put up with tall people whinging to the cabin crew that they should be there instead because tall privilege, or something.
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Watching airline commercials I have discovered that a coach/economy passengers can expect to be able to relax on a flight and other coach/economy passengers can expect to get some work done. Since this is the expectation set by the airlines, both the recliner and laptop worker are quite right to expect they be able to relax or work.
It seems the problem is not with the knee defender or the in flight napper but rather the expectations set by the airline do not match up with the reality of the service being delivered.
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Sorry, teapot, but you are wrong. I was flying with my four-month-old daughter. I was obviously holding her on my lap and had gotten her to sleep, but the jerk in front of me slammed his seat back without looking and hit her in the head.
This is a real problem.
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Why is your failure to plan actually someone else being a jerk? Because driving trollies.
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Read what you said. It makes no sense.
I was holding a baby. Where is the failure to plan? I should have planned ahead for that trip by not having sex with my wife and making a baby? That’s the only thing I can think of.
As for calling my comment “trolling,” I’m pretty sure most people here would agree that my post was constructive while yours is plainly irrelevant. YOU are the troll.
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I bet I could get that seat to recline, if I pushed hard enough. The key is to understand leverage, and pushing back toward the top of the seat. I might break his plastic parts, but I’d get the seat back. Something would break! Of course I would claim no knowledge of “knee defenders” and say I “thought it was stuck”. I only put it back about 2 inches anyway, and when the guy in front of me puts his seat back, it doesn’t hit my knees. It’s more the top of the seat, his bald head, dandruff, etc.lol
The design company Seymour-Powell created a new type of mesh airline seat for the Channel 4 series ‘Better by Design’ which had a much better recline that pushed the seat forward slightly even as it reclined and didn’t intrude on other people’s space nearly so much. It was also much thinner, and more supportive of the passenger. Unfortunately, it was never put into production, since the launch customer SwissAir went broke.
As for better seating by having them face one another, they’re being phased out on trains in the UK so that companies can now squeeze even more seats into a car. Some of the passenger routes out of London now have five seats across (3 + 2) in airline configuration and they make BA economy class look spacious.
Interestingly, BEA had backward-facing seats on some of their Trident airliners in the late 1960s as an experiment in improving safety. Passengers did not like take off or landing - especially in a plane that was notorious for its very high rates of climb and descent.
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Maybe it is time for a class action lawsuit against the plane makers and airlines then, since you say blame the airlines. Bottom line: If a chair cannot be reclined SAFELY, they should not be able to be reclined.
Safely means without warning to the person behind you.
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Everyone else is always to blame, especially not me.
@dustindopps was your child sleeping on the tray table? Otherwise I find it hard to imagine how you had got your kid to sleep with their head within inches of seat back in front. Your situation may be a legitimate gripe but again it doesn’t give you the right to interfere with someone else’s seat. The concept that he should have awareness of what is happening behind him is the troll. You knew you had a child within inches of a thing that is designed to move backwards, the person in front did not and, probably much to your annoyance, it’s actually not their responsibility to check since they were operating the seat as intended.
But apparently because I accept physical reality and am somehow able to perceive possible future use of things as they are intended I am ‘wrong’. The world does not revolve around you, especially when you’re just one of several hundred people who bought the same thing.
They can be reclined safely, as proven by decades of use without issue. Good luck launching a class action against an airline that you’ve chosen to purchase a seat on and which is fulfilling the agreed exchange of money for service as per your agreement.
The plane makers have nothing to do with it as the airlines choose how spaced their seats are, as determined by maximising their profit. In reality you should be launching a class action against yourself, or humanity, since the downwards pressure on seat price and customers choosing the cheapest option is the exact reason they jam people in like sardines.
[quote=“SamSam, post:122, topic:39763, full:true”]
I’m interested in the curve of this thread. Like others, I was surprised by the vigorous defending of Knee Defenders here on BB (along with implications that anyone who reclines in their seat are basically assaulting those behind them). But most of the comments in the last eight hours or so have been mocking these opinions.[/quote]
Me too, and I’m glad I checked back, it was downright discouraging to read those earlier comments.
Personally I think that as airline seats and surrounding space gets smaller there’s a need for discussion on how to handle this. Maybe the pre-flight safety demos can integrate a suggestion to go back slowly, with a little bit of warning. Its easy enough to push back just an inch or so, and then pause for a few seconds to let the person adjust before going the rest of the way.
Also, if the person who threw the drink in that “knee defender” a-hole’s face happens to read this, post a link and I’ll donate to your legal defense.
Hmm. Source? I feel like, if that were true, the airlines would just eliminate coach-class altogether. It’s not like free-to-play phone games where thousands of freeloaders drive the publicity that draws in dozens of big spenders.
Though first class represents less than 5 percent of all seats flown on long-haul routes, and business class accounts for 15 percent, those seats combined to generate 40 to 50 percent of airlines’ revenue, according to Peter Morris, the chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consulting firm.
That said, business only airlines have all gone under ( Eos, Silverjet, Maxjet…),
Those premium seats are profitable, but there isn’t that much demand for them.
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