As airlines shrink seat widths and legroom, the FAA is ready to investigate if shrinking space on airplanes is becoming a safety risk.
After pushes from groups such as American Airlines' flight attendants union, FAA deputy administrator Daniel Elwell said the agency will hold tests in November on seat sizes and how it impacts evacuating commercial aircraft in emergencies.
"We have 12 days of planned testing in November with 720 live bodies and the collection of 3,000 data points," Elwell said during questioning over seat sizes at a U.S. House aviation subcommittee meeting last week.
It's true that Americans are getting both bigger and older. The CDC says the average waist size for men is over 40 inches in 2016, an inch more than in 2000. And now 16% of Americans are age 65 or older, a number that continues to grow as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age.
Lori Bassani, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, said aging and larger passengers are making it more difficult to get out of shrinking seats, and that's worrying flight crews about what to do in the event of an emergency.
"It's the distance between seats, and it's a big safety concern," Bassani said. "The newer seats are less mobile and harder to get in and out of in that cramped space."
The Association of Flight Attendants that represents workers at United Airlines and Envoy are pushing for seat size rules, too.
Both the House and the Senate passed a provision in 2018 as part of the FAA reauthorization act that directed the agency to set minimum seat sizes, but the seat size rules were stripped out before it was signed into law.
The SEAT Act's sponsor, Rep. Steve Cohen, R-Tennessee, said in a statement that distance between seats, or seat pitch, has shrunk from 37 to 31 inches since airlines were deregulated in the late 1970s.
Consumer group Flyers Rights sued the FAA in 2018 to force it to regulate seat size, but the agency pushed back against the request.
On American Airlines, seats are spaced 30 inches apart in basic economy on many jets, according to the size-tracking website SeatGuru. On Southwest's most common jets, seats are spaced about 31 inches apart.
Bassani points to an incident in 2016 when an American Airlines jet had to be evacuated in Chicago because of a fire. It took 2 minutes and 26 seconds to evacuate the plane, well above the 90 second FAA mandate.
Bassani said the incident shows that passengers need to be able to get in and out of seats quickly. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed both crew and technical problems for the delay, along with passengers insisting on taking luggage and personal items while evacuating and blocking the aisles with rolling bags.
Still, Bassani said passenger size is causing friction on planes between passengers.
"It does create some problems with the passengers next to them, who don't feel like they have the space they paid for," she said.
