In 1978, you could sit in economy class with 35 inches between your knees and the seat in front of you. The seat was 19 inches wide. A meal came with the ticket. Your bags flew free. You didn’t choose this. It was just what the seat was.

In 2026, economy class offers 28 to 31 inches of pitch. The seat is 17 inches wide. The meal is $12. The bag is $35. The right to choose where you sit is $29. And if you want what the seat used to be — 36 inches of pitch, a few more inches of width, something approaching what your parents got for the base fare — that’s called premium economy, and it costs two to three times more.

The product isn’t the seat. The product is the gap between what the seat is and what it used to be. Airlines spent forty years engineering that gap. Now they sell the bridge across it.

Delta invented basic economy in 2012. Not as a low-cost option — as a psychological upsell tool. Strip the ticket of carry-on bags, seat selection, and changeability. Present the restrictions at booking. Watch the customer flinch. Delta’s president Glen Hauenstein said publicly that more than 50 percent of passengers “bought up” when they saw the warnings. That’s not a discount fare. That’s a flinch tax. Delta made $20 million in extra revenue from it in Q1 2016 alone. United followed in November 2016. American in February 2017. Within five years the flinch became industry standard.

Here’s a person. Anonymous. Six foot two. Three hundred pounds. Broad through the shoulders from years of contact sports. A gastrointestinal condition — diverticulitis — that means their gut doesn’t process pressure and immobility the way a textbook digestive system does.

Put that person in a seat designed for someone who doesn’t exist.

The average American man weighs 199 pounds with a 40.6-inch waist. The average American woman weighs 172 pounds with a 38.5-inch waist. Forty-two percent of American adults are obese. The seat is 17 inches wide. In 1985, no major US carrier offered an economy seat narrower than 19 inches. By 2018, some had dropped to 16.1 inches. The population got larger. The seat got smaller. This was not an accident.

Now put the person with diverticulitis in that seat for four hours. Cabin pressure at cruise altitude is equivalent to 6,000 to 8,000 feet. Gas in the GI tract expands 25 to 30 percent. Their knees are pressed against the seatback. They can’t shift. They can’t stretch. They can’t easily reach the aisle because they booked the window — the only seat where their shoulders don’t press into a stranger’s space. The lavatory is eight rows back and the cart is blocking it. The condition that makes this dangerous isn’t rare. Roughly 35 percent of adults over 50 in Western countries have diverticulosis.

This isn’t discomfort. This is a medical environment that the airline chose to create, that the passenger has no option to avoid at the base fare, and that the industry calls the economy product.

The solution the airline offers is money. Pay more. Upgrade. Buy the exit row. Purchase premium economy — which, again, is what economy was in the 1970s before they took it apart and sold it back in pieces. EVA Air invented premium economy in 1992 at 36 to 42 inches of pitch. Your parents had 35 for free. The innovation was the price tag.

Congress noticed. In 2018, the FAA Reauthorization Act mandated the agency to establish minimum seat dimensions — pitch, width, length. A law. Passed. Signed. Seven years later, no final rule exists. No minimum has been set. The FAA began “rulemaking” in July 2023, five years after Congress told it to. As of today, no minimum limits have been prescribed by any aviation authority for seat sizing on transport category aircraft. Anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, global airline ancillary revenue — the bags, the seats, the upgrades, the flinch — hit $92.9 billion in 2018. Spirit Airlines, which pioneered charging for carry-on bags in 2010, derives over 40 percent of its revenue from fees. And on May 28, 2025, Southwest Airlines ended its free checked bags policy — $35 for the first, $45 for the second — under pressure from Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund. The last holdout didn’t hold out. It held on until a hedge fund said let go.

The person in the seat — the anonymous one, the one with the shoulders and the condition — they aren’t asking for luxury. They’re asking to not be in pain for four hours. The industry’s answer is a credit card. The regulator’s answer is a rulemaking process that has taken longer than the design and certification of a new aircraft. And the seat keeps shrinking because every inch removed is a row added, and every row added is revenue, and the people who set the dimensions will never sit in them.

They don’t call it class warfare. They call it fare class.

Sources: Wikipedia: Airline Seat, Wikipedia: Basic Economy, Wikipedia: Premium Economy, CDC Body Measurements, FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, Wikipedia: Ancillary Revenue, Wikipedia: Southwest Airlines

// NEON BLOOD