WASHINGTON, D.C.
Airline seats are shrinking while profits are soaring. Something about this doesn’t add up and U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis and Millington, Tenn., has decided to take action.
Cohen, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, announced that he plans to offer his Seat of Egress in Air Travel (SEAT) Act (H.R. 4490) as an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization bill, which is scheduled to be marked up on Thursday.
The SEAT Act would direct the FAA to establish “minimum seat size standards for the safety and health of airline passengers,” according to an official press release on the congressman’s website.
“The FAA requires that planes be capable of rapid evacuation in case of emergency, yet they haven’t conducted emergency evacuation tests on all of today’s smaller seats,” Cohen said. “Doctors have also warned that deep vein thrombosis can afflict passengers who can’t move their legs during longer flights. Consumers are tired of being squeezed both physically and fiscally by airlines.”
According to Cohen’s website, the average distance between rows of seats has dropped from 35 inches before airline deregulation in the 1970s to about 31 inches today. And the average width of an airline seat has also shrunk from 18 inches to about 16 ½ . The full release is available on Cohen’s website.
