I love flying and I am so much in love with it that I even admit to enjoy being a passenger. However love for flying ends for most passengers after they got greeted with a friendly “Hello” when boarding. Because unless you fly Business Class or First Class, you are not only confined to a quite narrow space for anything between 45 minutes on a short-haul flight to 12 hours on an intercontinental journey. You are also faced with the fact that you do not even get two armrests along with the seat you have taken place in.

By now there must be Petabytes of articles, comments, pictures, stories of bad experiences and good advice for the traveller plus “seatiquette” available on the internet.

And here I am adding another few Kilobytes on MEDIUM, to speak out what the Airline Industry should already know by now: Passengers have two arms and anything less than two armrests fails the usability test conducted by life. I feel it is important to speak this out after the many decades long absence of two armrests on every commercial aircraft seat.

The past: No or two armrests

In case you did hope for an answer as to who “invented” four armrests for three seats (or three for two seats), I have to disappoint you. The second armrest has been missing for so long that some might even speculate about a secretive organization preventing its introduction.

In the early days aircraft either had benches with no armrests or offered a luxurious interior with a separate dining-room for passengers and ocean-liner-style lounge seats like the Boeing 314, the Martin M-130 or the Dornier DoX.

But then old pictures also reveal that passengers in “Tourist Class” did enjoy 2 armrests per passenger in a 1 by 2 seating on a Douglas DC3 as well as on board the Vickers Viking in a 2 by 2 seating when flying with BEA (British European Airways (known as BA today) in the 1940s). Even the 1920s Handley Page O-series, where the pilot was still sitting in the open, offered two armrests on its otherwise spartan seats. So what went wrong, that “Imperial Style” air travel to and from Great Britain did not become the norm in modern Customer Experience?

Blame it on the “Jet Age”

Since jets got people further and faster to their destinations than ever before, aircraft features, like the fold-down beds one had on the Lockheed Super-Constellation, vanished. But jets did consume twice as much fuel than their slower predecessors or even more than that! And my guess is that maintenance of the jet-engines was quite more costly, too. The logic of the learning-curve dictates so.

So while the Lockheed Super-Constellation had a four abreast seating, jets like the 707, DC8 as well the British VC-10 all debuted with a six abreast layout. The 50 percent increase in passengers was a necessity given the higher fuel burn (at 1950s and 1960s prices). But no matter how many seats per row: Mathematically each passenger in Economy Class only gets between 1 1/2 to 1 1/5 armrests for his or her two arms.

But to me every passenger should be entitled to two armrests since
humans have two arms by design!

Customer Experience
á la Roman Empire

And no, it is not about weight. Just think of all the weight airlines have added to accommodate Inflight Entertainment (IFE) Systems to keep people’s minds off their seats and away from thinking about the time they have to spend inside them. Just as much as cynics note that the “C” in booking classes should not stand for Business but rather the Economy “Cattle” Class, they also hint at the DC-10 or L-1011 having had a five abreast middle-row, placing as many passengers as possible directly in front of the central cinematic screen as if they had boarded a flying cinema.

Indeed, along with the food served by airlines, the Customer Experience delivered by the industry in Economy class may be dubbed “Bread and Games” (the formula by which the Roman Empire was run). According to Wikipedia the expression defines

“(…)the generation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace(…)“. (Quoted from the article version of July 21st, 2015)

And with modern Inflight Entertainment Systems (IFE) comprising also video-games which passengers can even play against each other, Internet access and in-seat power for laptops and tablets to play on, this phrase may have never been as true as it is today — except maybe that food and drinks have gotten cancelled on many flights or have to be paid for.

A seat is a seat is a seat

Meanwhile the seat as we knew it has changed to accommodate individual screens, separate cup-holders or a button to hang your jacket (for overhead bins are now cluttered with trolleys on dirty wheels. And of course we lost the little tray in armrests which used to serve as an ash-tray and often got stuffed with chewing gum, back when gums and drops still got handed out prior to take-off. We have seen non-reclining seats being introduced on short-haul and new designs which allow for a reclined position without interfering with the person’s space behind you.

Designers have reduced seat-weight using new materials and thin plastic armrests (on Lufthansa putting your arm on an armrest causes so much pain, that you no longer have the desire to use it; which though is not really a customer friendly answer to the issue). Seats now have a fraction of the weight of their predecessors. But instead of a second armrest, designers come up with looped or two level armrests to maintain the status-quo. It is weird to me, that the obvious answer — two armrests per passenger — seems to be no alternative to anybody. Maybe witchcraft is at work? Is aircraft seat design the bespoke business?

People will not upgrade into costly Business Class in order to get two armrests. And people who left or leave Business Class do so because of corporate cost-cutting or lack of cash, not because “Cattle Class” may have two armrests per seat. If that would be the case, airlines would not rush to offer “Premium Economy” to lure Economy Passengers to pay more because this would cannibalize the lucrative earnings from Business Class (yes, on Cathay Pacific’s Premium Economy you get two armrests, kind of).

How many seats do you have at home with just one armrest? How many office-seats with only one armrest has your company bought? A seat with just one armrest fails the most basic usability-test, even before deeper design and ergonomics issues come into play. Yet flying in Economy Class makes you wonder how an airline CEO looks like in his 1 1/3 armrest office-chair when going through real-time customer satisfaction dashboards (which probably none of them has?).

Amazing you can call this not

Having as little intimate space as one does get on the Tokyo subway during rush-hour is putting people under stress. And no matter how much you entertain passengers, they will still feel this negative stress. Even if a beautiful holiday awaits them at the end of the flight there will be negative stress on passengers and more so if they get juggled through turbulences to an unpleasant meeting.

The lack of two armrests is a source for discomfort, leads to low Customer Experience and conflict between passengers and between travelers and crews. Less than two armrests cannot make for a great Customer Experience, let alone the “amazing” Customer Experience everybody talks about these days. Indeed all the Customer Experience Managers who now fill the ranks of Airlines seem to have no intention to amaze the “Cattle Class”, the people who make up the vast majority of their customers in numbers (not in income-generated per capita) with a simple seat which features two armrests.

I admit that many travelers will not have issues sharing armrests. Indeed sharing one can be romantic if you can share it with your spouse and do not have to share it with your boss or the subordinate who wants your job-title. Armrests serve many functions from just holding on to them in bad weather conditions to creating just a little bit more distance to your neighbour, a little bit more room to breathe, your own comfort zone and freedom.

Passengers introducing DIY- style devices like this one to the aircraft cabin is also no long-term solution. Because any one of two armrest “owners” can refuse its installation.

Dragging in the real costs

The last potential answer to the industry secret of why they deny some passengers to have two armrests for their two arms — apart from witchcraft — is fuel-burn. There is no formula which tells engineers that the X cm additional fuselage diameter will result in Y costs per seat-mile or trip but one can calculate the overall efficiency of an aircraft.

But the efficiency formula of the aircraft must also have an equation for the costs caused by stress passengers and crews inherit from everything that results from two people having to share one armrest. While calculating this is probably next to impossible, the fact that no airline does offer two armrests per seat means that the potential competitive advantage cannot be netted in by any airline (and there must be a positive emotional experience because else two armrests would not be offered in Premium Economy).

But indeed from a bean-counter as well as technical point of view it is easier to upload another 50,000 songs to the databases of 300 IFE systems and have run a PR-campaign about it, than to put 50,000 new seats into 300 existing aircraft. Economically it is also less risky. Airlines are saving money in “Bread and Games”-Style.

The passenger’s
Customer Experience of the future

My hopes that the Japanese would do a better job in terms of customer satisfaction with their Mitsubishi MRJ vanished years ago at the Le Bourget Airshow in Paris. While their seats had their numbers fancily attached to its head-section, the two abreast seating on display had three tiny armrests only.

The Bombardier C-Series has the option of a wider middle seat in the five abreast layout rather than two armrests per seat. And yes, bean-counters already try to sell airlines the idea to squeeze more money out of that unfortunate middle-seat passenger by making him or her pay a premium for the wider seat which has no own armrests (now think about the “inflight infight” when the higher paying passenger demands full use of “his” armrests from the people in the window- and the aisle-seat).

There is no hope for passengers that two armrests will become the standard in the next 50 years, unless the travelling public starts to speak up and demands
two armrests for all passengers – what is social media there for anyways, if not to make oneself heard of?

Indeed with Boeing and Airbus now busy in designing their follow-up aircraft to the Boeing 737 (in service since the late 1960s) and the Airbus A319/320/321 (in service since the late 1980s) this is the last chance to start a change in seating-culture, which — even if it stars now by passenger demand — will take at least until 2050 to become global reality, because models currently in production will be around for a while.

In fact only when the last Boeing 737Max (which is currently under development and earmarked for delivery from 2017 onwards) will be retired, then the fuselage diameter of the 1950s Boeing 707 will become history, after approximately 80 years. It is almost as if Ford would be using the platform of its Model T still today!

The future of your arms is in your hands

Airbus dares to name its latest airliner A350XWB (extra wide body). But when it comes to two armrests for every seat the European jet from Toulouse shows as much extra width as a Parisian fashion model at an audition. So we have reasons to fear that both Airbus as well as Boeing engineers will again come up with too narrow fuselage designs to allow for two armrests for all passengers!

Passengers have been served badly by airlines for quite a while now. And airlines seem ready to squeeze more people into their planes (“Premium Carrier” SWISS will introduce a ten-abreast 3–4–3 seating in its new B777 Economy Class while Turkish or Singapore Airlines operate it in 3–3–3 layout) and more money out of them in “PremiumEconomy” while still delivering a Customer Service Experience which is not fit for the 21st century.

The new high-density A320neo will come with a 27-inch seat-pitch! Even Spirit, often referred to as worst airline in the US, offers 28-inch seat-pitch. Indeed in the future the only thing which may uplift the Customer Experience for passengers in Economy may be beauty of flying itself — in case it still can be felt.

Probably though it is not too late for passengers to speak up and to demand from aircraft manufacturers and airlines what is right given the fact that humans have two arms. So get up, get on and call for:

Two armrests
for all passengers!

P.S.: I case you not want to lobby your airline actively on Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn etc., I have created a Facebook-Page you may like to voice your support of two armrests per airline passenger becoming the new normal. Feel free to also start your own social media thing to call for two armrests for all airline passengers.