An Airline Eases Seat Squeeze; Will Others Follow?

German airline Lufthansa shoehorned 8% more seats into some of its planes by squishing rows of new seats two inches closer together.
"When the guy in front of me put his seat back, I still had a good four to five inches in front of my burgeoning belly," said frequent traveler Darren Mak of Winnipeg, Canada, who has a bad back but felt good, firm support.

Joe Winogradoff of New York City boarded a Lufthansa flight recently in Munich, saw coach rows scrunched together and figured the short flight to Frankfurt would be painful. "I thought, oh God, this will be bad. But I was really surprised," he said.

A next generation of ultra-thin airplane seats creates extra inches of space by using strong mesh similar to fancy office chairs instead of inches of foam padding. Tricks such as moving magazine pockets to the top of the seatback also leave more space for knees. The result benefits both passengers, who get extra space, and Lufthansa, which gets more room to add seats—and boosts revenue potential.

The seats, which will make their way into airplane cabins around the world, throw into question something airlines and savvy travelers watch closely: "seat pitch," a standard measurement of the distance from a point on a seat to the same point on the next row. Most airlines post seat pitch on their websites so passengers can make legroom comparisons.

The new Lufthansa seating looks ultra-skimpy—worse than almost anything flying in the U.S. or Europe—with a seat pitch of 30 inches. But because the seats take up less space, travelers actually have more room in that 30-inch row than they had when Lufthansa's seat pitch was a more traditional 32 inches. At knee level, because of the magazine-pocket relocation and other changes in the slim design, passengers get more than an inch of additional room.

"The importance, at the end of the day, is comfort for the passenger, not seat pitch," said Christian K?rfgen, Lufthansa's manager of in-flight product who led the airline's seat redesign.
Lufthansa has asked the government-run German Institute for Standardization to come up with a new standard for passenger space. The project manager for the aerospace standards committee said the group hopes to submit a preliminary proposal to a European aerospace industry group by the end of the year, with work to follow with the industry next year.

"Everybody who is really interested in giving quality information about seat comfort needs to come up with something more than seat pitch," Mr. K?rfgen said.

SeatGuru.com, a website popular with frequent fliers that rates best and worst seats on particular planes, uses seat pitch as a foundation of its comparisons. SeatGuru has flagged the new Lufthansa seats, noting they are thinner. But SeatGuru founder Matt Daimler, who recently traveled in the new Lufthansa seating, says he's now convinced the measurement that needs to be taken is the distance from the back of the seat, where it meets the bottom cushion, to the back of the seat in front of you. That would be the space available for your fanny and knees.

"The measure we need to compare is knee room," he said. "We need some new kind of representation of comfort to share with people."

When he sits in an AirTran seat with 30-inch seat pitch, said Mr. Daimler, who is 6-foot-1, his knees touch the seat in front of him. In the Lufthansa seat at 30-inch seat pitch, there was ample room. "Lufthansa felt to me like 32 inches," he said. "That number [30 inches] is not reflective of what you actually get."

Other seasoned travelers on recent Lufthansa flights felt like they had even more room. Ed Pizzarello, a private-equity executive from Leesburg, Va., flew Lufthansa in Europe recently and found the seating akin to the extra-room rows available on jetBlue Airways and United Airlines, which have a roomy 36-inch seat pitch.

"They have carved out two to three extra inches, and it felt like even more," said Mr. Pizzarello. "It was definitely better than anything in the U.S. in regular coach, other than Economy Plus and jetBlue."

Airlines have been moving to slim seats for several years, with varying levels of comfort. Some passengers complain that taking away the thick foam cushioning has worsened the ride, especially when rows are pushed closer together.

In the U.S., financial struggles prompted older major airlines to cut legroom to make space for more seats. United, Delta, American, Continental and US Airways all have the most basic coach seats in typical domestic planes like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 at 31-inch seat pitch.

Newer, low-fare carriers that avoided giant losses kept seat-pitch at more traditional levels. JetBlue Airways has 34 inches of seat pitch in its standard rows. Southwest has the same number of seats (137) in its 737-300 and 737-700 jets that it has had for decades, laid out in rows with 32- and 33-inches of seat pitch. Virgin America and Alaska Airlines also offer 32-inch seat pitch.

More change is coming as airlines, which have spent heavily to upgrade business-class cabins for international service, turn more attention to refurbishing coach cabins.

Adding more seats to planes is extremely attractive financially for airlines, potentially turning money-losing flights profitable when an extra five to 10 fare-paying passengers are on board. The new configuration also saves the airline hundreds of millions of dollars in new-jet purchases. On the A320, for example, Lufthansa added two rows of seats, giving the plane 174 seats instead of 162. Lufthansa says the extra seats on its entire continental European fleet are the equivalent of having 12 more Airbus A320 jets.