June 28, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:So I was reading an
So I was reading an editorial about the Southwest Airline fat scandal. For those of you who aren't familiar with this tempest in a tinpot, Southwest Airlines told overweight passengers that if they didn't fit into their seat (as measured by the objective standards of a) needing to raise the armrests in order to fit or b) needing a seatbelt extender), and the flight was full, they'd need to pay for that extra seat they were taking up.
The editorial was written by a member of the fat acceptance movement who, unsurprisingly, desired the repeal of this rule. Of course, she had a hurdle to get over, which is that while she's trying to fight Southwest, there's the fact that the extra girth doesn't bother the flight crew -- it bothers the person sitting next to the overweight person, who is sacrificing a third of their seat to their neighbor's Big Mac attacks.
How insensitive of me. It's not that overweight people are unhealthy; they're just unlucky. 'Fraid not; most fat people are fat because they are eating more calories than they burn off. Oh, there are exceptions, but according to the doc I interviewed for my last Salon article, metabolic disorders account for less than one percent of the overweight -- and as it happens, I am blessed with the most common of these, hypothyroidism. You pop your Synthroid like you're supposed to and the weight comes off. I'm sorry, but eat more, weigh more; it's not a mysterious formula.
Now, of course, everyone is entitled to weigh as much as they want -- but I don't see how that translates into an entitlement to take up space that other people have paid for. Losing weight is hard, but so is spending seven hours jammed against the wall of an airplane because your neighbor is spilling over into your seat.
The fat acceptance woman tried to get around this by proclaiming that she didn't want to take up her neighbor's seat; she wanted Southwest to make the seats bigger. Of course, she doesn't want to take anything from regular ol' folks like you and me; just the greedy corporation who wants to penalize her for her weight with no good reason.
Sorry, that won't fly. To see why, we have to take a look at a little airline economics. That's right, it's time for another timely lesson at Jane Galt U!
Try to make your gleeful clapping a little quieter; it's disturbing the people in the other cubes.
Our subject today is that age-old question: Why can't they just make those [Censored] seats a little [Expurgated] bigger?!
As with most questions that start with "Why can't they just. . . " the answer is cost.
The airline industry is an interesting kettle of fish. Ever wonder why you never get the same price twice for a ticket? That's because airlines are, or so their shareholders light-heartedly hope, extremely adept at upending their customers to shake every last nickel they're willing to pay out of their pockets. It's called price discrimination, and while it sounds scary and mean, it's actually a form of corporate socialism whereby business travelers subsidize your Hawaiian vacation -- so shut up and be grateful.
To see why this is, let's look at the major cost components of a given flight.
There's the guys running around in khakis and golf shirts back at headquarters nattering about revenue-per-passenger-mile and other things that make us dizzy and slightly nauseated with boredom when we dwell upon them too long; have to have 'em, if only so there's someone to appear in the commercials explaning the company's last plane crash, so we all have to kick a little into the kitty to support them in the style to which they'd like to become accustomed.
There's the landing slots at the airport, which are very valuable and handed out in a byzantine procedure which no one, including the airlines, entirely understands.
There's the airplane itself. Every time you use the airplane, it takes a little more wear and tear. Imagine that there are a fixed number of miles that an airplane can travel, even with great maintenance; you've just dipped into the mileage piggy bank and spent a little of it, decreasing the value of the airplane in the process. This is known as depreciation, and now you know what that mysterious thing is you've been hearing about all these years.
That maintenance doesn't come free either.
There's the jet fuel. This is an enormous component of airline expenses, which is why every time Saudi Arabia sneezes, airline stocks catch cold.
There are ticketing and baggage systems and union negotiators and Commodore Lounges, and the slow-normal girl who you talk to when you have trouble with your frequent flyer miles. . . all these things have to be paid for out of the revenue from flights.
Then there's labor. Oh, boy is there labor. Every time the flight attendants go on strike for higher wages, guess who's picking up the tab?
From the point of view of the flight, all of these things are fixed costs; whether you carry one passenger or three hundred, they stay pretty much the same.
There are also variable costs on each flight, costs that vary by the number of passengers on the plane, but you're not going to offset your jet fuel costs with fantastic savings on cocktail napkins. Almost all the cost of every flight is fixed.
That means two things. First, the airlines want each flight to be as full as possible. And second, because the number of passengers is limited by the number of seats, they want to shake as much revenue out of each passenger as possible.
It also means that there is a lower limit on the number of passengers that a flight can carry and still break even. The numbers I've heard with our new, more stringent security regulations, are around 73% of the current, tightly seated, capacity of the airline. Obviously, not all flights make money; some are used as loss leaders, to sell into the lucrative business market. Still, on average, the planes have to be pretty full just to break even on an operating basis, which is to say, leaving aside investment and financing costs. And for the airlines to actually make money, which is by no means a regular occurrence, they have to be fuller still.
Can you see where this is going?
Fewer seats mean the airlines can carry fewer passengers. Which means that they have to get more money out of each passenger who flies. Let's look a one aisle plane. The aisles are as small as they're going to get; for starters, if they were any narrower, our friends in the fat acceptance movement couldn't get down them, much less the beverage cart. So where is that extra roominess going to come from? You know the answer; from removing a seat. In each seat bank. In a standard one aisle plane (three seats to a side), that would mean cutting the carrying capacity of the airplane by a third. As you may notice from some simple arithmetic, this means that at current prices, the plane would lose money even if fully loaded.
So how do the airlines finance this goodwill gesture? From the vast corporate vaults where they store their ill-gotten gains? Brother, find me a consistently profitable airline and we'll talk. Post 9-11, the idea is ludicrous. No, they'll get the money from you and me.
In other words, rather than losing a third of our seat, we'll lose more of our hard-earned cash. And why should we do this? So that the fat acceptance folks don't have to bear the costs of their weight alone. Where do I sign up?
I'm not entirely unsympathetic. I'm 6'2 and all leg, and I don't fit into normal airline seats; I spend the entire flight with my knees wedged around my ears. I hate flying with Wagnerian passion. It's miserable, time consuming, and it makes my ears hurt. I can tell you stories about unsympathetic short people that would make your heart bleed. . . and no matter how much I diet, those extra inches won't seem to come off.
And sometimes I ask myself why they can't just give me a couple of extra inches of leg room when it's not my fault I'm so damn tall. And as with most questions that start off "why can't they just. . . " the answer I give myself is cost.
Because I don't want to pay more for my tickets. And I'm damn sure that you don't want to pay more for my personal comfort.
And if I don't like it, I can always walk.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 28, 2002 12:44 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>