Southwest Airlines To Profit From Americans’ Obesity…

Thinner Seats for Fatter Passengers?

Always a maverick in finding steady profits where the others lose money, Southwest is doing it again. Refusing to charge for baggage, the airline is making lemonade from American obesity by providing lighter, less padded seats in  its cabins. See, since passengers now provide more padding of their own, the airline can provide less, saving weight. The frames are lighter too, and the thinner seats (and a stolen inch each) provide for six additional bottoms per flight. Six added passengers definitely enhance revenue, if not necessarily cabin effluvium. The thinner seats also  provide more under-seat space for carry-on bags and maybe for caging small children, I’m not sure.  The rumor that the airline is simultaneously hiring a group of certified passenger-installation technicians for loading its planes has not been verified, neither has the possibility of new, really cheap fares for passengers willing to be anesthetized, rolled up and stowed in overhead bins. New Southwest Cabins will tell you the tale.

More seriously, we don’t know how the lighter seats compare in crash safety, either. Airlines are caught in a multiple bind: between government regulation, politically connected unions, high fuel costs and a declining economy. Passengers necessarily come last.  Southwest has been among the most intelligently managed carriers, which is to say, among the least politicized; some politicians are decidedly not fans as a result. It has done the best it could, which has been better than most. But from here on, the average flying experience seems slated to deteriorate along with the rest of the economy as government continues to impose rising costs on energy, security and health care to name but three. And that deterioration will be reflected in everything. Or as they used to say back in Rome: “Sic transit gloria mundi…”