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> Commercial airline seating is based on average passenger weight from the 1950s to 1970s, Hilderman said. Since then, people have gotten bigger, but seat pitch

> Commercial airline seating is based on average passenger weight from the 1950s to 1970s, Hilderman said. Since then, people have gotten bigger, but seat pitches have dwindled, he said — “29 inches in some cases, it’s absolutely ridiculous.” >> Of course, the average American is probably fatter than that, and has luggage as well, which means they're well above the 75kg design limit. That's the entire point. When is the point reached where people are getting to fat to safely fly from A to B within the design limits of the airplanes they are flying on. And at which point is time to charge them (and more importantly, allocate) double seats accordingly.

soganess 3y ago
When do we just fix airplane design assumptions to match the real world instead of forcing the real world to comply with the "reasonable" assumptions of the engineers / aircraft firms. I'm almost a full stone lighter than the 75kg assumption, but I'd never walk into an office and just say I'm average, lets just assume that when designing. That is garbage engineering. Your built in assumptions should include projections that cover the expected lifespan of the product, not what is average in the here and now. A simple regression fit would be better than nothing. We should better plan for the extrema of humanity as to not implicitly dehumanize people with averages. That just blows.