The Problems With Airline Seats

A pretty long article on airline seats.  Having spent an inordinate amount of time in airline seats recently, I found it fascinating and parts of it amusing:

In 1962, the U.S. government measured the width of the American backside in the seated position. It averaged 14 inches for men and 14.4 inches for women. Forty years later, an Air Force study directed by Robinette showed male and female butts had blown up on average to more than 15 inches...

But the American rear end isn't really the important statistic here, Robinette says.

Nor are the male hips, which the industry mistakenly used to determine seat width sometime around the 1960s, she says.

"It's the wrong dimension. The widest part of your body is your shoulders and arms. And that's much, much bigger than your hips. Several inches wider."

I was acutely aware of the shoulder problem.  I don't have any problems with my ass fitting the airline seats, but there's no way to sit in a coach seat and not have my shoulders lapping over into the seat beside me.  Heaven help the people on the other side if I get stuck in a center seat.  I always try for the window seat.

Furthermore, she says, women actually have larger hip width on average than men. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that, at least in certain instances. 

The industry used the male hip as a seat measuring stick "thinking that it would accommodate the women too, but in fact they don't accommodate the larger women."

Funny thing, I never hear women complain that their ass is too wide for the seat.  Maybe the other way around, though.

The result: Airline seats are approximately 5 inches too narrow, she says. And that's for passengers in the 1960s, let alone the supersized U.S. travelers of today.

Which reminds me of the story of how horse's asses determined the size of the Space Shuttles booster rockets.