A Frontier Airlines passenger took to the internet to blast her seat opponent. She’s flying the airline’s Airbus A320 from a middle seat. The man at the aisle is spreading his legs into her space. That’s incredibly rude. She has so little space to begin with, and he has access to the aisle!
The woman posted a photo and explained, “Look where the center point of my seat is, and then look where my legs and his legs are respectively.” She asked him not to do this and “he minimally tried to be better after that” but she was still “so uncomfortable the whole time.”
[M]en of the world, I plead with you to be more aware of your manspreading on airplanes. I understand small seats aren’t built for you, but this level of manspreading and disregard of my personal space was something I’ve never experienced before.
Before I scooted my legs over, the full length of this dude’s thigh was so forcefully pressed against mine that there was no way he didn’t know it was happening. Forget wanting more leg space, I would have settled for not having to touch a stranger to the point that I can feel their body heat.
She says that “This problem isn’t confined to frontier……” and that may be true, but it’s certainly worse on Frontier and Spirit!
Frontier Airlines offers as little as 27.8 inches of “seat pitch” or the distance from seat back to seat back. That compares to a standard 30 inches on American, Delta and United and as much as 32 inches on JetBlue and Southwest (both JetBlue and Southwest are expected to reduce the legroom they offer in standard coach as they add premium seats onto their planes). Those extra inches matter!
As I look at the photo, the male passenger appears to have long legs, or at least ‘long for a Frontier Airlines seat.’ I’m not sure how easy it is to keep them straight and forward, and therefore confined to his own seating area.
I think it’s fair to say that someone with that body type should be required to buy extra legroom (on Frontier these used to be called ‘Stretch’ seats but are now ‘Premium’). While airlines often don’t enforce the rule, many require passengers ‘of size’ to buy two seats rather than one if they’re too wide for a seat. Shouldn’t the same principle apply here?
- Someone may not wish to spend more money to travel, even if they need it
- That doesn’t give them the right to encroach upon the same, limited space another passenger paid for
You may not like that, but it seems like expecting a woman to confront a tall man, when she’s pinned between him and another passenger (if she’s in the middle, or the wall of an aircraft if she’s at the window) seems a bit rich.
Perhaps the most egregious case of manspreading is a passenger who encroached on an aisle seat from across the aisle:
@claireandpeter GOODBYE
Each passenger is entitled only to the space within the confines of their own seat, except that the window seat passenger can lean into the window, the middle seat passenger gets both armrests, and the aisle seat passenger can lean into the aisle at their own risk.
Here’s how to handle a seat-spreading situation.
- Try to start a polite conversation about it.
- Should that not help, look around to see if there’s an empty seat in the cabin. If there is, ask a crewmember if you can change seats.
- And if there’s not, enlist a crewmember to help ensure your seat opponent stays within the confines of their own space.
At the end of the day though it means a certain amount of discomfort for a limited (though seemingly interminable) period of time and other people can be awful. Passengers shouldn’t have to endure this, but there’s a limit to how much escalation is possible or wise while stuck inside a metal tube. What would you do?
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