COURT TO FAA: CHECK SAFETY EFFECTS OF SMALLER AIRLINE SEATS

By Miriam Raftery

August 7, 2017 (Washington D.C.) -  In recent years, passengers have been complaining about shrinking seat sizes while airlines seek to squeeze out maximum profits.

But last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to conduct a review to determine whether those claustrophobic small seats pose safety hazards to passengers.

In the case, Flyers Rights Education Fund, Inc. versus the FAA, the court found that the FAA has a pattern of rejecting public concerns without adequate basis for doing so, San Diego Free Press reports.

For instance, the FAA dismissed public concerns that smaller seats might make it harder for passengers to escape during an emergency, but cited no studies to back up that conclusion.

The court ruling says of that FAA action, “That makes no sense,” adding, “As a matter of basic physics, at some point seat and passenger dimensions would become so squeezed as to impede the ability of passengers to extricate themselves from their seats and get over to an aisle.”

A San Diego Free Press article reports that the FAA has similarly ignored complaints by local residents over increased airplane noise and low flights, an issue that some East County residents have complained about as traffic into Lindbergh Field has been rerouted over their neighborhoods.

 Yet the FAA ignored public concerns in rolling out its Southern California Metropolex Project, or Next Gen, and has now released its “Noise Integrated Routing System” model for public comments.  But the prospect of the FAA actually addressing those comments in a meaningful way seems remote, given the FAA’s history of ignoring public concerns without documenting its own basis for decisions that affect the safety and wellbeing of passengers or the public at large.