More Leg Room, Please
I’m old enough to remember the days when flying coach was not torture.
When such things as leg room were a matter of course, not a matter of non-existence. When the seats were a little wider, not now when they are practically molded to your body like a second skin. When the seats were cushier, not barely there padding. When hitting the reclining button actually reclined the seat, not move it just a quarter of an inch.
This is all very top of mind with me, having just flown coach to Europe recently.
Give the airline engineers credit. If their goal was to figure out how many people you could fit in coach, comfort be damned, profits be exalted, well, they succeeded.
And we, like sheep, allow ourselves to be herded, single-filed, and corralled.
We know the drill. It starts before even getting on the plane.
The entire plane-riding experience from boarding to de-planing to, god-forbid you checked your bags, baggage claim, seems to have been designed by a sado-masochist.
Boarding. If you are among the lucky and/or those with a gazillion rewards points, you may score a boarding group below number 4. Or, if you wish to, you can pay some extra bucks for that privilege.
And why is it a privilege? What does it matter when you board as the plane isn’t leaving without you and you have an assigned seat?
Well, it’s the holy grail of course. Overhead space.
It seems every flight these days is packed and invariably there will be the announcement that because it’s a full flight overhead space is at a premium and they ask for volunteers to check their bags. If you are in boarding groups 5 through 9, you feel a shiver run down your spine. Will there be enough overhead space when I get on?
This fear is what causes the phenomenon the airline coworkers call Gate Lice. I prefer the term Gate Huggers myself. People start to crowd the gate. You might be boarding group 6, but gosh darn, at around boarding group 3, you start to make your way to the front of the gate. You hover. You crowd. You position yourself. You monitor the flow. When they call Group 5, you are primed to be the first person when Group 6 is called. Some have it down to a science and can tell when the previous group’s line is finishing up and will get in line before they even announce the next group’s boarding number.
Once through that hurdle, the line moves slowly through the jetway. As you finally step onto the plane, you are greeted by the steward or stewardess who gives you a fake smile while underneath they are thinking “I hate people, why did I take this job?” I think the only people more miserable than those of us flying coach, are the stewards and stewardesses also flying coach. But they have to pretend to be happy. Most of them, anyway. Some don’t give a damn if you know they are miserable.
This next part is where the sado-masochism hits its apex.
You are forced to go through 1st Class in order to get to your coach seat. And nothing happens quickly on a plane. So you are moving slowly, sometimes stopped there for a bit, and feeling like the beggar in the bible who begs for crumbs from the rich man’s table, we see a whole other world.
A world of, dare I say, comfort? Look at those wide, cushy seats! Oh my, is it? Can it be? Leg room? Wait, there are individual pods? With seats that lay flat for sleeping? They serve you glasses of champagne? Rack of lamb? Warm towels? Even the pillows and blankets are better.
Suddenly, though you are an ardent supporter of capitalism (hey, I read Ayn Rand when I was 14), you start to question the system. Such flagrant inequality. Such a gap between the Haves and the Have Nots. Why can’t we all have equal amenities? Why this stratified experience where the rich get all these indulgences? Or, at the very least, why is the chasm between 1st class and coach so huge? They’ve engineered the hell out of coach to minimize comfort and maximize profits, but they went all in on comfort for 1st class. And unless you have a bajillion points, or a bajillion dollars, or you know how to sign up for multiple credit cards for the promo points to fly first class, you are riding coach like the majority of us. So much bounty for so few people.
After that glimpse of nirvana, we shuffle our way into Dante’s 7th circle of hell, I mean, coach. Our stomachs are in a knot as we start looking for our row and we start looking at the overhead bin capacity to evaluate whether we’ll be ok. We don’t exhale until we reach our row and our bags are safely stowed in the overhead bin.
Then there’s the aisle dance. Are you in an aisle seat? You need to get up to let the middle and window seat people in. Or out, if they need to use the rest room during the flight. There’s no room for them to pass, so you have to physically exit your seat and stand in the aisle to let them out. But you have to pay attention. Are the food/drink carts in action? Note their location and speed of movement. You may need to delay until they pass. Make sure you know which direction your seatmates are headed in, so that you step into the aisle in the right direction so as not to block them from the direction in which they are headed. Otherwise, you have to do a bit of lean in situation on some other passenger seated in an aisle near you. No one wants that.
Plane food. Can it really even be called food? “Chicken or pasta,” they ask me. Being Italian American there’s no way I am taking the pasta. “Chicken,” I answer. How bad could the chicken be? I peel back the flimsy plastic cover. I can’t even tell where the chicken is. Just some amorphous blob of something green, something brown, something gray. I think the gray stuff was the chicken. I looked around me to see if people were actually eating this. They were. “Maybe they got the pasta,” I thought. I ate a roll with a little butter and three slices of cucumber. Fortunately, because I knew better, I had packed snacks. I pulled out some trail mix and a granola bar.
Most flights to Europe from the East Coast are red-eyes. As I settled in for the 7 ½ hour flight I tried to get comfortable and find some sleep. It was only 7 pm my time, but 1 am Europe time. When we landed it would be around 7:30 am Europe time.
So sleeping on the plane is critical. But sleep is impossible. Because getting comfortable is impossible. A comfortable seat in coach is an oxymoron. You shift left. You shift right. You sit straight up, feet on the ground. Straight up, feet tucked under the seat. Straight up feet under the seat in front of you. You slouch down, feet way under the seat in front of you. You use your carry on that’s stowed under the seat as a foot rest. You cross your legs, you uncross your legs. You cross them at the ankles, you uncross them. You jostle for space on the arm rest with your seatmate. You give up and watch 3 movies.
Finally, it’s time to deplane. As painfully slow as the boarding process is, the deplaning process is worse. You are cranky, tired, hungry, thirsty, and just want to get the hell off the plane. But you know the drill. You gotta wait your turn, as aisle by aisle the plane empties. Some people however can’t wait. They jump up immediately as the plane stops and open their overhead bin to get their luggage out. Even though they are in coach, row 30.
Some people are so antsy they take any opportunity to get ahead. On our return flight home, it was my turn to exit my row. I stood up. Oops. Forgot to unbuckle my seat belt. Sat back down and unbuckled. Took like half a second. The guy sitting behind me couldn’t wait and proceeded to get in front of me. He got nowhere any faster. He simply got ahead of me. And then later I saw him at the baggage claim, and thought, “Why the hurry, dude?” (We were boarding group 9 on that flight and the dreaded announcement came for volunteers to check their bags).
That brings us to baggage claim. As noted earlier in this blog, most of us seek to avoid the baggage claim process if we can. Just one less pain point in a process fraught with pain points. You make your way to the baggage claim area. You’d think by the time it took you to deplane and get to baggage claim, the bags would already be on the carousel. But no. So everyone hovers by the spot where the bags come out. Similar to Gate Lice. Only it’s Carousel Lice. How many people can glom into one spot? Then when that space has reached maximum capacity, it simply expands out from that point. Almost no one opts to stand in a spot furthest from the carousel opening.
As you stand and wait, the thought of “I hope they didn’t lose my luggage” goes through your head. As the bags start to spew out from the carousel opening you anxiously study each one. You don’t want to miss yours. Then, when you finally do see your bag, you have to think and act quick. Do you try to break through the multitude in front of you with an “Excuse me, that’s my bag” or do you skirt around the horde, and catch it further down. Either way, once you have successfully retrieved your bag from the carousel you feel like you climbed Mt. Everest and someone should give you a medal.
I think it’s time to do what patriots before us have done. We must come together as one and protest.
We need to establish a Declaration of Comfort for Coach:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Comfort while flying Coach. That whenever any Airline becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to demand that they do better and to hold them accountable for their cruel and unusual punishment. We demand more leg room, wider and more comfortable seats, and the ability to recline more than a sliver.
A girl who loves to travel and see the world can dream, can’t she? Meanwhile, knowing how razor thin airline margins are, and the cost of fuel right now, a girl’s best bet is getting some Xanax or melatonin for the next trip.
Bon voyage!