On Our Personal Space — How airlines can do better to keep us from feeling violated when we travel ?

I was on a day trip flying back from Oklahoma City earlier this week. It was one of those Embraer jets and I had snagged a window seat in Economy class, way in the back. I opened up my Dell tablet to catch up on emails and was just beginning to think that the tablet (with its smaller profile when compared to a 15.6” or 17” laptop) was actually letting me catch up on work even in the cramped space of my Economy seat. Just a few seconds after this thought crossed my mind, the passenger in the seat in front decided to recline his seat in one big jerky motion. Suddenly his seat invaded into my space with no warning and luckily the tablet or me didn’t get squished in the process. He was well within his rights to recline his seat, but then I started to ponder — What do we pay for when we buy an airline ticket? Shouldn’t our ticket be reserving space for ourselves and our bags? It appears we pay for our seats and not space. Shouldn’t we all be protesting this grave injustice and get the airlines to give us our space that we paid for? I remember the parallelogram linkage from my “Mechanisms” class in engineering school. Shouldn’t the reclining seats in an airplane be designed with a parallelogram linkage so that when one reclines all the other seats recline at the same time. From high school geometry, this will keep all seats parallel to each other preserving the space for passengers in every seat. Shouldn’t passenger rights guarantee us this much? I started this conversation with my co-passenger on the left. She looks at me and says, sure you can get that now, it’s called Business Class or First Class seat.

We all work in spacious offices, and most of us except for the very poor amongst us have reasonable amount of space in our homes. Other than some friendly fights with our siblings and then our spouses and our kids we don’t usually encounter this kind of space violations in our lives other than perhaps when we are on the road. Why then have we all as passengers not risen up in arms and taken to the street to protest this grave injustice being done to us? The cost of an airline ticket has to buy us our space on the plane not just the seat. We shouldn’t tolerate the violation of our limited space due to poor design of the seats. Or, maybe every other seat has to be upside down with the luggage hold below, so a passenger in front of us reclining doesn’t rob us of our space.

There has been enough written about Southwest’s attempts to get the rather well built passenger buy more than one ticket on the flight as the seat on the plane is designed for an average sized human and does not accommodate oversized people. Shouldn’t airlines have a few seats like the Exit row perhaps designated for these oversized individuals? Maybe, I am getting unduly sympathetic of late because I am getting close to being oversized myself. I remember journeying on a Greyhound bus as a student in the late 1980’s from Rhode Island to New York City(NYC). I had gotten on board first and promptly taken the window seat. I am looking forward to my first trip to NYC and quite excited actually. I had not paid attention to the fact that the bus was filling up quickly and the seat next to me had not yet been taken. I see this heavy set man about three times my size boarding the bus. My immediate thought was I hope he doesn’t pick the seat next to me. I am looking to see if he picks the two or three empty seats in front of me, but he walks past them and is approaching me. He probably scanned the seats when he boarded and perhaps immediately spotted the twenty something anaemic youth occupying a seat all by himself in the back. He was probably looking for a comfortable seat and with out any vacant seats, the next best thing for him was sitting next to someone like me which he promptly did. I still haven’t forgotten that bus ride. I remember thinking I should get up and move to one of the other empty seats and lose my window seat so I could ride in comfort. But I felt that it would be rude and decided against it. But clearly that day was one of the days when I felt my space was violated.

I experience this violation of space on my drive to work almost everyday. I drive mostly on a local road in lane traffic. I hate to give up my position in the traffic line. I try to protect the space between me and the car in front of me quite religiously. I treat it like my space. I know the types that would like to overtake me on the right or left and swing in to my lane in front of me. I have to almost tail gate the car in front to prevent that from happening. The days when I lose that battle I feel frustrated has someone has chosen to violate my space. I probably do the same to others when I cut in front of them. If you are like me you probably understand what I am saying, if not I hope I have opened your eyes.