Airline seat recline has become something of an obsession for U.S. media this week, after a United flight from Newark to Denver was diverted to Chicago on Sunday because two passengers got into a fight over seat recline. One passenger used a device called a Knee Defender, banned by United and many other carriers, to prevent the passenger seated in front of him from reclining; that passenger became angry and, after Mr. Knee Defender refused a flight attendant’s request to put the device away, threw water on him. Both passengers were removed from the flight in Chicago. This incident catalyzed widespread and sometimes heated debate in the media about when it is and is not acceptable to recline, and what to do about the great, age-old sectarian conflict between the recliners and the anti-recliners. But the generally accepted terms of debate are flawed: they assume the conflict is an intractable one when it isn’t. A seat design exists that would eliminate it altogether.

The fundamental problem with seat recline is that it’s a tradeoff between one person gaining recline and another person losing knee room, and the decision-making power lies solely with the person on the side that receives all the gains. That person has no incentive other than perhaps etiquette or a sense of altruism to consider the needs of the other in reaching their decision. And if their decision-making power is usurped… Well, they might just get angry enough to throw a cup of water at the usurper.

One contribution to the debate that has attracted considerable attention is that of Josh Barro of the New York Times’ The Upshot, who is an avowed recliner and argues that passengers should pay the person in front of them if they want that person not to recline. From the point of view of the potential recliner, Barro’s proposal changes the tradeoff from being one between their recline and some other person’s knee room to being one between their recline and whatever amount of money the other person is willing to pay them to forgo it. This gives the person who normally would stand to lose some leverage, commensurate with the monetary value they place on their knee room.

Of course, this is a completely impractical idea. It’s hardly reasonable to expect passengers to engage in negotiations with those seated behind and in front of them over how much they value recline and knee room respectively. It would be absurdly time-consuming and, as Sunday’s incident shows, those negotiations would have the potential to become very heated. Many people find flying stressful enough as it is, without the added stress of a bidding war over seat recline. But the analysis is still illuminating, because it takes what is generally considered an etiquette problem and restates it in the universally understandable terms of money.

Barro’s analysis is like most of those that have appeared in that it focuses on how passengers should behave in the face of what is assumed to be an intractable conflict. The whole debate takes for granted that some passengers will want to recline, and that reclining will reduce the space of the passengers seated behind those who recline, and that some of the passengers so affected will naturally object. Given the current design of most airline seats, however — particularly economy-class seats, which the vast majority of travelers occupy — there really is no solution to that problem. Some people will recline, and some people will get annoyed that the person in front of them is reclining, and nothing will change that.

Given the current design of most airline seats.

People generally don’t like economy-class airline seats very much. Those who have flown on a variety of airlines and aircraft types will know that some seats are more comfortable than others, and not just because some have a bit more room. But it’s only a matter of degree: virtually all economy-class seats in use today are essentially similar, and most people don’t find any of them terribly comfortable. Better design can help, however, and the recline problem is one of those it could most easily solve.

In order to be as comfortable as possible in all respects, airline seats need to be thought of not as seats so much as personal environments of which providing a place to sit is only one function. A passenger’s seat and those around it form most of their environment during a flight. The seat is the surface they sit on, yes, but the rest of their environment is made up largely of the seats in front and on either side of them, and their seat in turn forms much of the environment of the passengers behind and on either side of them. This is an environment in which people spend long stretches at a time: a medium-haul flight from Newark to Denver like the infamous one on Sunday takes around four hours (when it’s not diverted to Chicago, that is); an ultra-long-haul flight from Newark to Hong Kong takes sixteen. An environment in which people are confined, albeit willingly, for hours at a time ought to be thoughtfully designed to be as livable as possible.

There are actually some airline seats that are already designed very much along these lines: the business and first-class seats used on long-haul flights. Here, most major airlines have in recent years adopted sophisticated, innovative seat designs of which the marquee feature is their ability to turn into flat beds at the push of a button so passengers can sleep comfortably, but which are also designed almost like tiny rooms. The designs take into consideration things like storage space, ease of viewing the in-flight entertainment screen, optimal positioning of the tray table for ease of eating and of working, ease of accessing the aisle, privacy from adjacent passengers, and more. Such seats are enjoyed by United’s business-class passengers on that sixteen-hour flight from Newark to Hong Kong, but the passengers in economy — which is to say, the vast majority of them — must make do with ones virtually identical to those they’d occupy on the four-hour flight from Newark to Denver, or for that matter a one-hour flight from Newark to Baltimore.

What matters in the seat-recline discussion is that long-haul premium-class seats are typically designed so that each passenger has a fixed amount of space to occupy, and how they choose to configure their seat — upright, reclined, or flat — has little to no impact on their neighbors. The seat moves around within a defined space, dedicated to one passenger and separated from that of others by partitions and other hard furniture that stays fixed as the seat moves.

One airline, Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific, actually extended this logic to economy class several years ago. When it redesigned its cabins in 2007, it introduced a fixed-shell seat design in economy class. As the name implies, the seatback has a hard outer shell, with the upholstered, cushioned part forming its inner surface. When a passenger reclines, the seat bottom moves forward, and the upholstered inner seatback reclines as it does so. Meanwhile, the hard outer shell remains fixed in place. With this design, the passenger sitting behind the reclined seat sees no change, and it’s the knee room of the reclining passenger, not that of the passenger sitting behind them, that is reduced. Rather than a tradeoff between their recline and someone else’s knee room, a prospective reclining passenger faces a tradeoff between their recline and their knee room. The decision as to which is more important is theirs alone and has nothing to do with anyone else.

Problem solved.

Unfortunately, many passengers found the fixed-shell seats uncomfortable, and when Cathay Pacific got a new CEO in 2011, he decided to stop installing them on new and refurbished aircraft, choosing to return to less-controversial conventional seats instead. But some aircraft still have the fixed-shell seats, and the airline’s web site still features a page touting that with them, “your space really is your space.” No one can recline into your knee room — or complain if you decide to recline because you’re encroaching on theirs.

Cathay Pacific’s fixed-shell experiment may have failed to please its passengers, but it was only the industry’s first attempt at adapting this type of design to the space limitations of economy class. For the sake of the peaceful coexistence of all passengers regardless of their reclining preferences, not to mention all those innocents who are inconvenienced when a flight has to divert because a seat-recline argument went too far, it shouldn’t be the last.