Credit: Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast
A judge calls it a ‘life-and-death safety concern.’ A government document shows there may not be enough room to brace for impact. Inside the potential dangers.
As airlines pack seats tighter than ever, the tests supposed to show that passengers can get out alive in a crash are woefully out of date. The FAA won’t make the results public, and a court warns there is “a plausible life-and-death safety concern.”
For years the airlines have been allowed to steadily shrink the size of coach class seats and the space between seat rows without regulators considering the impact of this on safety. A Daily Beast investigation has found:
• The tests carried out to ensure that all the passengers can safely exit a cabin in an emergency are dangerously outdated and do not reflect how densely packed coach class seating has become—or how the size of passengers has simultaneously increased;
• No coach class seat meets the Department of Transportation’s own standard for the space required to make a flight […]
Sounds like a slave ship. The robber barons and celebs all have their own aircraft.
I haven’t flown in a while and doing my diligent shopping for fares found a low cost fare. I couldn’t believe it. I am 6′ tall and had no room in front of my knees and the seat went back 2 ” . I was not allowed any overhead storage. It was horrible and cross country so it took a while for the torture to end.
Our corpratocracy is a deathtrap along with our government regulated airplanes, apparently.