Dec. 11, 2013 8:24 p.m. ET
Airbus is hoping to bring bigger aisle seats to coach but it's meeting resistance with airlines, who are making seats skinnier, not wider. Scott McCartney joins Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.
Toulouse, France
You can buy extra legroom in coach on most airlines, but how about extra elbow room?
Airbus thinks it has an innovative way to create wider coach seats for wider passengers willing to pay a fee. But airlines won't give an inch.
The European airplane maker has designed coach seating for its A320 family of jets, some of the most widely used planes in service, with an extra-wide aisle seat and slightly narrower middle and window seats. A320 coach seats are uniformly 18 inches wide. Airbus wants to take one inch off each middle and window seat to make aisle seats 20 inches wide. Presto! A bonus add-on fee for airlines selling wider coach seats!
You'd think airlines would jump at the chance to sell yet another add-on fee to travelers. Charging passengers for the wider seat could raise several million dollars in revenue over a 15-year period, Airbus estimates.
But so far, airlines aren't buying it. In fact, they're focusing on making seats skinnier.
Airbus tested the idea with passengers of different sizes, genders, ages and body-mass indexes. It found aisle passengers delight in the extra room, which affords them space to change positions and avoid the stiffness and pain of being locked in a slim chair for hours.
The new seat would be ideal for the expanding market of very large passengers, Airbus said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 35.7% of Americans are obese. So why shouldn't 33% of seats on a plane be designed to accommodate the girth? Airbus also figured wider aisle seats would be popular with passengers with young children on their laps, senior citizens and those wanting more space to work.
"People answered that legroom and kneeroom were better. It's because you can change positions," said Zuzana Hrnkova, head of aircraft interiors marketing for Airbus.
Surprisingly, tests also showed that middle-seat passengers liked the setup better than conventional seating, she said. Even though they lose an inch of seat width, their shoulders have more space from seatmates on the aisle because that passenger is farther away. The point is clear when you sit in a mock-up of the seats at the Airbus design center here. Sitting in the middle between two others, my broad shoulders didn't feel squeezed.
Window-seat passengers were fine with the slimmer seat: They tend to scrunch up against the sidewall anyway, Ms. Hrnkova said. Seventeen inches is about the width of economy seats on Boeing 737s, the most common plane in airline service.
The A320 cabin is 7 inches wider than its rival, the 737, though Boeing maintains that its tube is less curved at passengers' shoulder height, making the difference less pronounced. Airbus says one airline customer, which it won't disclose, challenged the manufacturer to find a way to get ancillary revenue out of those extra 7 inches, and designers came up with the wider aisle seat idea.
Airbus has presented the idea to several airlines around the world that fly the A320, but none has opted to install wide aisle seats. While carriers have been plenty willing to reduce legroom on many rows of airplanes so that a few rows can be sold with expanded legroom, they aren't willing to do the same for seat width.
Virgin America tested a mock-up of the Airbus offering but "at the present time we don't think it is a fit for our business model and guest-service approach," a spokeswoman said. The airline worried that the slimmer seats for non-aisle passengers would be disappointing, and passengers overall would prefer the uniform 18-inch seats.
Likewise, United Airlines and JetBlue Airways say they aren't interested. "Giving one customer a 20-inch seat at the cost of two other customers having their seat width reduced is not what we want," a JetBlue spokesman said.
Low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines, which charges fees for everything from carry-on bags to seat assignments to having agents print boarding passes, said it is studying the Airbus idea. A spokeswoman said it is among a variety of options being considered.
Airlines say having different seat widths in the same cabin would introduce more complexity, plus the expense of retrofitting thousands of seats across a fleet. If the wider seats weren't in every A320, they could disappoint passengers when they have to substitute airplanes for maintenance or scheduling issues. Big airlines flying multiple plane types also have the problem of not being able to offer wider aisle seats in the coach cabin of Boeing's narrow-body planes, like the 737 and 757.
In addition, the 20-inch aisle seat might provide a cheaper alternative to buying a first-class ticket to get a wider seat. Some international airlines offer premium economy on long trips with extra width and legroom, typically for about 50% more than a regular coach ticket.
"The implementation is quite challenging," Ms. Hrnkova of Airbus said. Still, she has hope. "Airlines are always looking to differentiate their cabin product. Maybe if one selected it there would be a snowball effect."
The growing girth of people has led to wider seating areas in many public situations where space is limited and packing in seats can lead to more revenue. In 1990, the average seat in performing-arts theaters was 21 inches. By 2010 that grew to 22 inches, according to a study by Theatre Projects Consultants Inc. The new Yankee Stadium opened in New York in 2009 with seats ranging from 19 to 24 inches wide, compared with 18 to 22 inches in the old Yankee Stadium, according to the baseball team. The basic seats on Amtrak's Acela trains are 21 inches wide. (Older trains have coach seat cushions 20 inches wide.)
But airlines have been making coach seats skinnier, not wider. On widebody jets, airlines have more flexibility to determine how many seats they want in each row. On American Airlines' existing Boeing 777-200s, for example, the airline has nine seats in a row. On its new 777-300s just being put into service, coach cabins have 10 seats in each row. The width of the fuselage didn't change—it's a longer airplane—so the seats shrank from more than 18 inches to about 17 inches. Other airlines are making similar moves with widebody cabins.
"It's gone back to the 1960s in terms of comfort," Airbus spokesman Martin Fendt said.
Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com
