Quote:
Originally Posted by jimworcs
There is absolutely a need to make FAA rules in relation to seat pitch. This is urgent. The market is placing enormous pressures on airlines to cram as many seats as possible into the airplane. This has safety implications and needs to be addressed. I believe that a statutory minimum of 31" should be mandated.
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Those FAA regulations are already on the books. I'm honestly too lazy right now to look up the exact FARs but they do exist. On mainline aircraft in the US there aren't any airlines with a seat pitch of less than 31 inches. This is because the airlines have been able to demonstrate that the aircraft, when full, can be completely evacuated in under a given time limit. This is also why there is additional pitch in exit rows and in some cases there are only two seats in some exit rows in an aircraft with a 3x3 configuration.
There is also a correlation to the number of seats and how many flight attendants must be staffed on each aircraft. This is why airlines like JetBlue and Southwest have additional pitch. They chose to remove a couple of rows of economy seats so they don't have to add an extra FA. When Delta started taking delivery of 737-800s they too had an odd configuration where the last row had two seats on one side and a inexplicable "dead space" between the last row and the aft bulkhead. They then decided to add the seats back, shrink the overall pitch and add the extra FA.