Everyone loves taking vacations and going on trips to exciting locales. We plan our itineraries, arrange for accommodations and a car or driver, and perhaps book a tour guide.
The one part of every trip that makes people cringe is air travel! Flying today is so uncomfortable that finding a way to be comfortable on a plane requires a mega dose of imagination and creativity.
Some find the window seat with slightly more space a better comfort zone, and even improve that spot by bringing their own pillows. Others hope for an aisle seat so they can stretch a bit into the aisle.
But if you end up in the middle seat … nothing can be done for you! All I can suggest is a strong sleeping pill and a valium so you can be hallucinatic (my word) for the entire trip and totally unaware of your surroundings.
With this in mind, I read about two airline seat manufacturers attempting to create a new style of airline seats (not for our comfort, obviously; just to get more seats in the plane for the airlines), and I just had to see what this new seating map would look like.
One of the companies has created seating whereby every second seat is reversed—sort of like the way you would set up chairs for a game of musical chairs. Seats were made even smaller and looked to be hard plastic instead of cushioned, with no arm rests, and the middle-seat passenger would be facing you with his legs alongside your seat in this configuration.
My first thought was how anyone would ever get out of there to go to the bathroom or in case of emergency. The manufacturer answers this question by stating that all of these seats would fold up like a folding chair so people could get in and out more easily.
My second thought was, “Easier for whom?” I could just envision those seats popping up and down, with people coming in and out of the aisles—of course, with narrower aisles and some seats not working, as things sometimes happen on an airplane, and so people would be unable to lower and raise those seats … nightmare city!
Well, if I thought that was bad, I then read what the second manufacturer was working on. His seats (if you could call them that!) would be in the shape of a saddle, like on a bicycle. People would not really be sitting but more like standing, with their behinds leaning on this saddle seat—sort of like that ride at the amusement park where people get strapped in standing up and holding onto poles on both sides while the ride goes into freefall.
This manufacturer decided that he would create a different seat class which could double the number of people that an airplane could carry, since people would be standing, more or less, and then offer discounts to those people taking those seats. With the extra number of people that could be placed in this discounted class, the airlines would still be making huge profits!
The seating situation has become so bizarre as the airlines look to squeeze more and more people into the nooks and crannies of the airplane, to the detriment of people’s health.
Next, I expect to hear that some manufacturer has found a way to give us all intravenous medication to put us to sleep, then stack us on pallets in cargo to make way for more passengers. Airline seating has already gone beyond the Twilight Zone, and soon it may not be fit for humans at all. We may all go back to traveling by ship! Even steerage must have been better than this!
Anessa Cohen lives in Cedarhurst and is a licensed real-estate broker (Anessa V Cohen Realty) and licensed N.Y.S. mortgage originator with over 20 years of experience offering full-service residential, commercial, and management real-estate services as well as mortgage services. She can be reached at 516-569-5007 or via her website, www.AVCrealty.com. Readers are encouraged to send questions or comments to anessa@AVCrealty.com. Read more of Anessa Cohen’s articles at 5TJT.com.
