A little digging around the interwebs will tell you that this company has proposed similar seats before, with no takers (apparently those looked more like a horse saddle), no airline has ordered these seats yet, and even the designer says they’re designed to pack people in on short flights, not long hauls (so no worries about standing for 12 hours from Paris to San Francisco). Though it does seem that the major hangups the airlines have about them is that the space between seats raises questions about evacuation speed and there is no room for storage under the seat in front of you, so passenger comfort doesn’t seem to be very high on their priority list…
In any case, I’d rather rent a car and drive 700 miles than spend 90 minutes in one of these contraptions.
Jet fuel is a highly refined fraction of diesel / kerosine. The CO2 emissions from biodiesel are typically 50 to 70% lower than normal diesel. The trick is to find some biofuel that stays liquid at 40 below. Generally, there is a small uptick in NOx emissions that many are still working on. They’ve got a workaround but it involves an addition to the diesel engine exhaust basically scrubbing the exhaust gases.
Thank you for reminding me to relax, center myself, and let go of my ego. Otherwise the photograph of this seat design might’ve inspired a lot of pointless rage.
Let’s please not equate (even shittier) airline seats with the utter inhumanity that was the Caribbean slave trade, ok? There’s no fucking comparison there.
The fundamental discounting of human dignity and experience -for profit- is a slippery slope, tho. I don’t see direct comparisons being made, I see ‘inspired by’.
The comparison/inspiration is that slave trading was wholesale, this is retail.
Philip Jose Farmer had an SF world (dayworld Trilogy) with tech to turn people temporarily to stone. Travel was done “stoned” and stacked like cordwood in a cargo bay. Sounded awesome.
Flew Spirit earlier this month, seat in front of me was broken and reclining in my face. I literally couldn’t hold my trade paperback between my chest and his seat! Was a brutal flight, not to mention they missed the connecting flight and just told us “tough”, no refund of any kind. Fortunately the connection was Houston and we were going to New Orleans, so we rented a car. Nope Spirit, not ever again!
The seats do not in any way compare to actual slave conditions. The slave trade was horrible.
This is a “first-world problem” (although things are more and more inter-related with developing countries).
Perhaps it is possible to criticize the airline’s attitude of viewing its passengers as human cattle akin to slaves.
In the process of evoking an extreme image of slavery, this is also a false slippery-slope argument where worst-case conditions are supposed to inevitably follow. They don’t.
These seats are “Steorn-worthy.”
The seats are designed to provoke bullshit, so that people will accept other travel humiliations and fail to challenge the status quo.
Seriously why not just start stacking vertically rather than horizontally. Like bunkbeds with no headroom. Plenty of people myself included might see this as an upgrade even if there wasnt enough height to roll over.
Or just go full on and play up the fun aspect renaming the airline clown cabin.
I’m confused, I wasn’t aware Spirit had planes where the seats actually recline? Or was that the brokenness? But yeah, I made the mistake of flying a redeye on Spirit from CA to MD, without realizing just how bad they are. And I made the same decree – NEVER AGAIN!
