Airline Ergonomics Versus Economics

July, 1999

by David Cogswell

July, 1999

Every time I travel, the people I meet have horror stories to tell. Most of them are about airlines.

The airlines are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, and they are splendid examples of the behavior that has become standard mode of the modern corporation. It exists to maximize its profits and that is more or less its entire objective, its entire strategy, its entire code of behavior. It is never stated in a business plan that the goal of the business is to make a profit within the bounds of what is legal or ethical, or of some value to the world. It may be said that those objectives are implied and need not be stated in a business plan. It is not the place. Business is business. And in the realm of action in the real world as well, it seems that there is no place for ethics.

In practice, in the particular variation of the market system in which we now live in America, profits are the ultimate goal of all activity. Everything else must be justified in terms of its long term or short term capacity to be profitable. Developing a friendly relationship with a community is justified only because it contributes to profits. That is the only kind of argument that is acceptable in a corporate board room. It is considered the obligation to the stockholders to do everything possible to maximize profits. That is the sole ethical principle that drives the entire system. Every limit is to be tested. Every possible way to cut costs must be pursued aggressively. Every way to increase volume and create growth is considered.

The airlines fit the standard model in their behavior. The airlines are making more money than ever and are more aggressive than ever before in seeking to cut costs. They will cut everything possible and continue to cut until they see some sort of negative impact in their profits.

Whenever I'm riding in economy class in an airline, I can see that they apply the same cutting strategy to ergonomics, the design of the accommodations for the human body. They will cut every centimeter they can to squeeze another row into the plane and increase profits. And they will do it until they see it affect profits adversely. If one airline offers more comfortable seats at competitive prices, and it is not run out of business by predatory practices of the larger more established airlines, and succeeds in winning marketshare, then it might inspire the others to introduce more comfortable, humane seating arrangements. But it would have to be justified by increasing profits. No board member is going to be thinking about whether your knees are chafed, or whether you can walk properly when you land, or whether you and your neighbor have to carry on a silent duel for eight hours over who uses the armrest that lies a few inches from your ribs. Objectives other than profit must be justified by profit.

So I know they are going to cut ergonomic dimensions just as they cut services, food quality and quantity, number of ticketing agents, or commissions to travel agents (which translates as a cut in services to customers).

The conditions of riding in economy class are not suited to human beings. To the airlines the comfort of human beings is not the goal of the design of seats. That's secondary.

So I'm riding in the plane for 12 hours or so from New York to Peru and my knees are chafed and cramped from having nowhere to be. Human arms and legs are not considered of the design of the plane. They give you a two-inch metal strip for an armrest and you must share it with whoever happens to sitting next to you. If it's not Ghandi, or someone like him that you are seated next to, it's likely to get a little tense being in such physical intimacy with some one for several hours. I'm sitting next to this guy who is using the armrest in a fairly natural way, with the soft part of his arm resting on the metal and his elbows are in my ribs. I could either assert my right to do the same, in which case I would be also poking him in the ribs, or my elbow would be forcing his elbow back to the center of the armrest, giving us one inch of metal each with our elbows butted up against each other.

Or, confronted with this elbow in my ribs, I can take the peaceful approach, refuse to force a struggle and just adapt to it. Which means I have to find a place for my arm somewhere other than next to my rib, where his elbow is. So I can hold it forward, or cross my arms, or hold my arms up above my head.

This may be okay for a while, but over sustained periods, it creates a lot of tension. The designer Victor Papanek said that he could design a living space in which he would guarantee a divorce within 18 months for any couple that lived there. The science of ergonomics is based on designing around the human body. But those considerations have been done away with because airlines no longer feel they can afford it. They gain volume by taking your neighbor's elbow room out of yours. His arm space intrudes into yours at least a couple of inches.

As I'm sitting in this unnatural, aggression-producing intimacy with this stranger, I can imagine the men in the board room looking at a floor plan and saying they could add one more row if they could just cut a few more centimeters from the space allotted to each passenger. This one more row may be 10 more seats, multiplied times every plane, every flight, every day throughout the year and it adds up. That will bring them closer to their growth goals for this year. They get a little crazy over the numbers. Their eyes light up like slot machines. They envision the model consumer as a sack of potatoes that sits squarely in the middle of the seat, no arms or legs, no messy extensions hanging out of the allotted space. After a few more years at this rate they'll take out the arm rests all together and just squish us up against each other.

And while I'm thinking of all this, struggling with where to put my limbs, thinking perhaps I could just stick my arms over my head where there is a little room, maybe I could tie them up there above me so they can just hang there relaxed. And I think of those gentlemen in the board room, those smug, self-satisfied, fabulously rich men making decisions to trade off my leg room for their growth projections. I'm burning with resentment and I wish I could barge in on one of their board meetings after a night of no sleep on one of their airplanes and tell them what I think of them.

The man who was sitting next to me was a Peruvian, of a different culture, with a different language and slightly different conceptions of social space and territory, but I'm sure he was a quite fine fellow, if I had not been forced to be pushed up against him, knocking elbows, ribs and knees for several hours. Under the circumstances, the initial vague discomfort of unfamiliarity grew and festered until I came to detest the man. I found myself repressing urges to grab him, shake him, smack him. I grew increasingly grouchy and vaguely menacing. The energy for maintaining a social front of politeness gradually wore away. After he fell asleep, he began to snore. He took off his shoes, and I began to smell his feet. They were no more foul than most people's feet when they take off their shoes after a day of work. But they were a little close.

Early in the morning I smelled... gas. What can I say? The word gas is so vague it doesn't express what I mean, does not begin to express what I exprienced. What do you call it in polite society, when someone passes gas? Well, call it what you wish. I don't mean to offend, I'm merely trying to describe my actual experience. This is an inevitable consequence of sharing a small compartment with a large group of people for a number of hours. People are, after all, only human. One would hope people would be discreet and use the rest rooms conscientiously. But that doesn't always happen.

After a period of hours I begin to feel like one of those rats in those experiments with rats I have read about, when scientists increased crowding conditions to observe the effects. What they saw was a marked increase of aberrant and anti-social behavior, violence and mothers eating their own young.

Then there are the effects of people sharing an atmosphere in a closed environment that they share for hours, coughing and sneezing all together, breathing the same air over and over sharing and breeding our germs together, like inhabiting a huge Petrie dish. The airline limits the amount of outside air it brings in because it costs money to process and heat that air. Have to watch that bottom line.

To be fair to the airlines, they do drive the travel industry; they do provide something that is of tremendous value to a great many people; and their prices have risen less than inflation in the last 30 years or so. Their market research tells them that for most people, price is their only consideration in choosing an airline, other than the basic requirements, such as, that the airline flies to the desired destination, does not crash and arrives at a reasonably convenient time. If that's all people want, why give them more?

There are various ways to balance profits, value and long-term customer loyalty. But to the airlines, like most corporations, there is no such thing as enough profits. If they push their growth rate one year by lay-offs or structural cuts of some kind, they have to match it the next year with something else. The mode of behavior of a corporation that is struggling for survival is the same as one that is making huge profits. There is never a place after survival and profitability have been attained when a corporation says: okay, enough profits. We'll try to maintain a steady state here, make a healthy profit and also make an effort to make a meaningful contribution to the world. The drive to make more money never changes.