PRESCOTT, Ariz. - The Federal Aviation Administration Thursday was expected to release an update sometime soon on its refusal to regulate the distance between passenger seats and their size in airplanes, following a request from a passenger advocacy group and ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.
Passengers may soon get a little more legroom on flights, depending on results of an updated review by the FAA.
William Waldock is a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
“Recently, we’ve seen a lot of airlines have been shrinking it down from 32, 31 in a few cases, all the way to 28 inches,” Waldock said.
The decreasing seat size and pitch, as the distance from the back of one seat to the back of the next is known, prompted the Flyers Rights group to ask the FAA to regulate both, pointing to safety and health risks.
When the FAA responded to the group, saying seat spacing was a matter of comfort, not safety, the nonprofit challenged the FAA in court.
Waldock agreed 28 inches wasn’t safe.
“Trying to get out of an airplane like that is going to be a lot harder if you have the narrow seat pitch like that if you have a true emergency evacuation,” Waldock said.
Thursday, it had been nearly a year since a July 2017 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court of Appeals in Washington, which stated the FAA relied on outdated or irrelevant tests and studies before making its decision and asked the agency to come up with better reasons for its response to the group’s safety concerns.
Waldock said while airlines were focused on adding more rows to carry more passengers, there needed to be a middle ground taking more than economics into account.
“I think probably the good compromise average is somewhere between 31 and 32 inches. That means somebody who’s six feet tall can sit in the seat and they’ll have about an inch from their knee to the seat back in front of them,” Waldock said.
An updated answer from the FAA to Flyers Rights was not in yet Thursday, but was expected soon.