FAA's Failure to Stop Seat Shrinkage Targeted by Passenger Group

The Federal Aviation Administration said this week that it has “no evidence that there is an immediate safety issue necessitating rule-making at this time,” despite a court order that it examine whether shrinking legroom and cramped seats should be regulated.


“Now that the FAA bureaucracy has again rejected any regulation of seat size and passenger space while ridiculing passenger discomfort and dismissing all safety and health concerns, the only likely recourse for the traveling public is by overwhelming public outcry to comment online in opposition to the FAA decision,” Paul Hudson, president of the nonprofit citizens group Flyers Rights, said in an emailed statement.


The group sued the FAA in 2017, claiming emergency evacuations could be slowed by more tightly-packed seating after airlines began adding rows to their planes, enabled by new, slimmer seat designs.




Partial Demonstrations
Flyers Rights said in a press release that the FAA admits it doesn’t test airliner compliance with its rules that passengers must be able to evacuate a fully occupied aircraft within 90 seconds. Instead, the agency relies on partial demonstrations by manufacturers Boeing Co. and Airbus SE that Hudson called “questionable.” He noted that the U.S. House passed legislation in April mandating the FAA to set seat standards.


Jeffrey Gardlin, the FAA’s senior specialist on cabin safety, said in a response to the Flyers Rights petition that the agency has overseen extensive research on evacuations. Gardlin said he’s witnessed full evacuation tests on 18 different aircraft models since 1982.

Hudson asked members of the public to contact Congress, acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, or Trump, adding that the president “has apparently never flown commercially for many years.”

Private Jets
Trump travels primarily on Air Force One, which refers to two highly customized Boeing 747-200B series aircraft complete with three levels, 4,000 square feet (372 square meters) of floor space, and expansive suites and office spaces for the president, senior advisers, guests, and the traveling press corps. Before his election and during the presidential campaign the real estate developer and reality television star mainly used a Boeing 757-200 private jet.

The FAA in a letter dated July 2 said that the tighter spaces in today’s commercial jets are not the real liability in the case of evacuations. Rather, they said, exit doors are the choke points.

“The FAA has no evidence that current seat dimensions hamper the speed of passenger evacuation, or that increased passenger size creates an evacuation issue,” the agency said in an emailed statement on Friday.

The National Transportation Safety Board in recent years has investigated several emergency airline evacuations in which passengers grabbing their luggage -- against crew-member instructions -- slowed down the process.




By Alexa N Green July 6, 2018,