Having to repose forward or bend backwards to see through the aeroplane window always makes one wonder, why in the world couldn’t the designers align the rows of seats with the windows? Was that harder than creating a freaking 900,000 pounds of metal through the skies? Well, you should probably go easy on the designers, as there are many other reasons for this ‘mistake’.
- Planes are designed once, but decorated several times:
An aeroplane is designed by manufacturers with a fixed row positioning, and most likely with each window aligned with the seats. But the final seat placement and decoration are in the hands of the airlines who purchase the plane. Thus you see different standards being followed on different planes.
Pic Credits: macleans -
Pitch of the frames is unrelated to the pitch of the seats:
The pitch is the measurement from one seat to the exact same point on the seat in front or behind it. The placement of the windows is required to cut through as few frames as possible. So the window alignment is entirely dependent on frame spacing, whereas seats can be moved inside the plane without having any effects on the dynamics of the structure. Windows are fixed, seats are not!
Pic Credits: yimg -
Preferred seating arrangements:
Every airliner company has to decide between the recommended seating arrangement and their self-designed one. For example, Boeing 777 is recommended to have a layout of 3+3+3 with a 32 inch (81.2 cm) pitch for their economy class. This means that a passenger density of at least 67% is required before passengers are started to be seated along each other. But companies usually employ an arrangement of 2+5+2, which means only a passenger load of 55% is required before people have to start sitting next to each other.
Pic Credits: worldnow -
Money is the anthem:
Seats are usually movable and installed on rails. So the airline companies usually change their position over time, mainly in a bid to cram more and more passengers into the plane to get some extra dough. They steal your leg room and in return squeeze in another row of seats, thus increasing the capacity of a flight and their profit at the expense of your comfort. This situation is not helped by the fact that there is no set rule on how many passengers and seats that can be squeezed into commercial aircraft. Thus, to make their flights more economical and market competitive, the airliners decrease both the pitch and the width between the seats to squeeze in as many people as possible.
Pic Credits: twototravelandtango
Do you have any other reasons on why the airline windows are not aligned with the rows of seats?
Let us know in the comments’ section below!