end reclining seats

We have a love hate relationship with reclining airplane seats. They are great if you want to nap more comfortably, but if you don’t and the passenger in front of you does, that can be quite annoying. The airlines know this, and are considering their disappearance forever.

These seats also impose other problems on airlines. They are more likely to break down, but they also add weight to the seats, something that does not help final fuel consumption.

Some airlines don’t even offer that button on coach seats, while seats began to appear in the late 2000s.”pre-reclined“, lighter and that fixed the backrest at an intermediate angle: neither completely upright nor completely reclined.

British low-cost airline Jet2 was one of the first to use them in 2009, and British Airways also began using them later for flights lasting less than four hours. Ryanair he charged them directly in 2004 as a measure to make better use of space. The airline then commented how this would allow it to save about two million euros a year.

And when it doesn’t try to save for it, it tries to make its users pay more with debatable ideas. Like for example, travel standing.

There are many other cases: in 2019 Delta reduced the degree of inclination of its seats from four inches to just two inches for economy class, and from 5.4 inches to 3.5 inches for first class. American Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines They also limited reclining to two inches on domestic flights

There are a couple of clear additional factors in the partial or complete disappearance of that option. The first, that airlines can eliminate the possibility of choosing reclining seats in economy class and charge those seats as an interesting extra to raise the price of tickets. After all, the future seems prone to the appearance of “premium” middle class seats.

Reimagining the airplane seat

The other, of course, is space savings. According to CNNif an airline can save 2.5 cm of space per row, that will be equivalent to about 76 cm on a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. Or what is the same: a whole extra row of seats.

There are several attempts to revolutionize the seating arrangement. For example, with double height seats like those devised by the young Spanish entrepreneur Alejandro Núñez Vicente. There are also curious designs that they reposition the middle seatusually the worst rated when traveling by plane or unique ideas —or maybe terrible— like that of the inverted seats.

For now, yes, airlines are betting on pre-reclined seats. This is indicated in the aforementioned CNN article, which gives the example of the manufacturer Recaro, one of the firms that is taking advantage of the trend to equip airline planes with their seats.

To find out the degree of inclination – in Recaro it is light and ranges between 15 and 18 degrees – the concept “max pax” is used used by industry. That is, the maximum count of passengers that each plane is certified to be able to transport.

In an Airbus 321neo, for example, it is up to 244 passengers if everyone traveled in economy class, but when the front part is used for the traditional first and business class seats, the seats are considerably reduced and drop below 150 passengers. .

Even so, traditional seats are “slimming” in parallel with the rest of the techniques. It changes the structure and becomes thinner right in the part where travelers have their knees to allow them to be more comfortable. That extra space for the knees, of course, is usually another argument to raise the price of the ticket.

The advantages of eliminating reclining seats are obvious on short-haul flightsbut things change with longer flights. Meanwhile, if you are going to travel by plane, it may not be a bad idea to let the passenger behind you know if we are going to recline the seat.

Image | Aleksei Zaitzev

In Xataka | Obesity is a growing problem, so airlines have opted for a drastic measure: weighing travelers

In Xataka | First class seats are a thing of the past. Airlines now want absurdly luxurious business class

*An earlier version of this article was published in January 2024