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United Airlines to fly Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker plane this fall

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Star Wars designs decorate a special United Airline plane debuting this fall. 


United Airlines

It may not be the Millennium Falcon, but United Airlines plans to a debut a plane with a Star Wars look this fall. 

During Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, United Airlines announced it will introduce special Star Wars-themed airplane to its fleet to promote the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the latest Star Wars movie.

The Star Wars livery will be on one of United’s Boeing 737-800 planes, according to the company. Along with the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker logo, other artwork on the plane includes imagery of Star Wars vehicles such as a TIE fighter and an X-Wing. 

There’s also a different lightsaber on the either side of the plane’s tail. The alternating colors of orange and black on the sides of the plane reflect the two sides of the Force — light and dark. 

The plane’s new Star Wars livery artwork is so subtle, even Star Wars actor Mark Hamill tweeted on Saturday that he didn’t notice it. “I’m not seeing the SW connection here,” he wrote. “Cool plane though.” 

“The aircraft will be exploring the ‘domestic galaxy’ and will not be assigned a specific route, meaning customers across the US may have the opportunity to travel on this unique plane,” United spokesperson Natalie Noonan said. 

As part of the promotion, United is giving away two tickets to the premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Fans reacted to the new United Airlines Star Wars designs on social media. Wrote one: “That’s cool! Does it sound like a Tie Fighter when it’s flying?”

Lucasfilm and Disney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time airplane livery has promoted Star Wars.

In 2015, Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA) featured BB-8 and R2-D2 designs on the outside of the company’s Boeing 777-300ER wide-body planes and Boeing 767-300 planes in honor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker debuts in theaters worldwide on Dec. 20.

Originally published on April 12.
Update and correction, April 13, 10:49 a.m. PT: Adds Mark Hamill reaction. Also, the original story suggested United Airlines will fly more than one airplane with a Star Wars look. The airline will fly just one such aircraft. 

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Air-travel officials grapple with issue of unruly passengers

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Economy class seating in the new WestJet 787 Dreamliner airplane is shown in Calgary on February 14, 2019. In the wake of an onboard incident where flight attendants and bystanders acted swiftly to deal with alleged sexual harassment, Canada’s two biggest airlines say its crews are trained to handle passengers who pose a threat — though one expert warns that airline policy and behaviour are two different matters. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Todd Korol

Incidents involving unruly airline passengers have been rising in recent years. In 2017, airlines reported one altercation for every 1,053 flights, up 35 per cent from the previous year, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Drugs and alcohol play a leading role in many of these incidents. The association says 27 per cent of the cases involved alcohol consumption or some other kind of intoxication. An additional 24 per cent were related to non-compliance with smoking regulations.

“Drink-fuelled air rage is becoming more commonplace,” says Robert Quigley, a senior vice-president for International SOS and MedAire, which provides travel-security services. “Multiple agencies that oversee in-flight regulations are now collaborating with the commercial airlines to review present practices of the selling and the consumption of alcohol in both airport bars as well as inflight.”

It looks like a simple problem: too many airline passengers are getting drunk. But the solution is not so simple. Some passengers say the obvious answer is for airlines to limit sales of alcoholic beverages. But airlines are leaning toward a regulatory fix, perhaps because they’re reluctant to lose the revenue from selling alcohol to passengers.

If you’re on a plane this summer with someone who’s had one too many, you can still protect yourself. But you’ll have to be proactive. (More on that later.)

Airline crews are trained to handle intoxicated passengers. They also have strict policies to prevent inebriated passengers from boarding — but they don’t always work.

Randall Flick, a recently retired airline pilot, recalls one traveller who breezed past a gate agent and boarded Flick’s plane while “heavily” intoxicated. “I told him that he wasn’t getting on his flight. I don’t think he really understood,” Flick says.

The inebriated traveller and the gate agent were both at fault. Flick says the passenger should have had less to drink before boarding and the gate agent should have screened him properly and kept him off the plane.

“The gate agents didn’t always notice when a passenger was intoxicated,” Flick says. “Most of the time, the intoxicated passenger just went to sleep as the cabin altitude rose during the flight. But an intoxicated passenger could endanger the safety of others during an emergency.”

Federal law prohibits flight crews from allowing “obviously intoxicated passengers” to board aircraft, and it doesn’t allow flight attendants to serve alcohol to anyone who appears intoxicated.

Another regulation prohibits passengers from “assaulting or intimidating” crew members and interfering with their duties. Doing so carries a fine of as much as US$35,000 and a prison sentence of as many as 20 years.

For some air travellers, the solution to this problem seems clear. If the government can end smoking on flights, then why not ban drinking? Barring that, why don’t airlines better enforce the rules that prohibit intoxicated passengers from boarding an aircraft and continuing to drink on board?

“Don’t allow people to board a plane if they’re obviously drunk and limit the drinks any passenger can have inflight,” says Barbara Howell, a frequent air traveller and registered nurse from Carpinteria, Calif.

But alcohol isn’t always the problem. Consider what happened this year on a Delta Air Lines flight from Seattle to Los Angeles. A passenger allegedly refused to stay seated and walked toward the cockpit several times. The flight diverted to Portland, Ore., and police arrested the passenger, who told authorities he had been high on methamphetamine before boarding the plane.

The airline industry believes more regulations would help.

The transport association, which represents the worldwide airline industry, has lobbied for stronger international treaties to deter unruly behaviour. It says gaps in the international conventions governing such offences allow many unruly passengers to escape punishment. It wants, at a minimum, for authorities to clarify what constitutes unruly behaviour and to reinforce the right of airlines to seek recovery of the significant costs of dealing with unruly passengers.

“We need more countries, including the U.S., to ratify a new treaty that closes loopholes that enable unruly passengers to elude any legal consequences on international flights,” says Tim Colehan, an assistant director for the association.

Experts believe a few practical steps would also reduce the number of unruly passengers in the air. MedAire’s Quigley says airlines need to develop an industry-wide policy that limits the number of drinks per passenger and to enforce this policy consistently. Gate-screening processes should also be tightened, he says, and should involve airport security personnel, not just airline employees.

“Flight attendants are not trained or expected to act as law-enforcement agents,” Quigley says.

One obvious solution is to stop serving alcohol on board, an idea regularly floated by passengers who have grown tired of the seemingly endless parade of such incidents.

But alcoholic beverages account for more than half of all in-flight sales, so it’s unlikely the airline industry will go there.

As usual, the fix is up to passengers. For your safety and that of your fellow passengers, avoid alcoholic beverages or recreational drugs before and during a flight.

If you’re seated next to someone who is drunk or high, don’t wait for the cabin doors to close. Report the passenger immediately, but discreetly, to a flight attendant. Someone who smells like a distillery shouldn’t be allowed to board.

If the flight crew doesn’t do anything, and there’s no empty seat to move to, ask to take the next flight, time permitting.

Just remember that until we find a workable solution, you don’t have to become another anecdote in an air-rage article.

— Washington Post

Bomb cyclone storm hammering central US, disrupting travel

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Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies postponed an afternoon game against the Atlanta Braves until August. A few school districts in Colorado and Wyoming canceled classes, while others opted for a shortened day and canceled evening activities. Local governments, including in Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and state government in the Denver area closed offices early to give workers time to commute before conditions worsened.

Hypersonic air travel just took a step closer to reality

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Sixteen years after the Concorde supersonic airliner took its last flight, a handful of companies are working to create a new generation of airliners capable of flying faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1, or about 770 miles per hour). Firms like Boom and Aerion promise to be flying passengers at 1,000 miles per hour or more by the mid-2020s.

But some companies are working toward passenger planes that will leave these supersonic jets in the dust. These so-called hypersonic aircraft would be capable of flying at or above Mach 5, or about 3,800 miles per hour. At Mach 5, a trip from New York City to London would take just two hours instead of the typical seven or eight.

An English company claims to have taken a big step toward a hypersonic future. Reaction Engines, based in Oxfordshire, announced Monday that it had successfully tested an engine cooling system that could support aircraft flying at Mach 3.3. If subsequent tests go well, the “pre-cooler” system could help aircraft reach Mach 5 or higher — and possibly power a spaceplane.

The system addresses one of the biggest challenges in the development of hypersonic airplanes: controlling the buildup of extreme heat within engines.

The Sabre engine was created to curb the extreme heat buildup in hypersonic plane engines.Reaction Engines

At Mach 5, air temperatures inside an engine can reach 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s enough to melt metal, and it interferes with the combustion that generates the propulsive power. The pre-cooler lowers temperatures by passing super-hot air over thousands of tiny coolant-filled tubes.

In the first round of tests, conducted in March at a facility at the Colorado Air and Space Port in Adams County, researchers used a fighter jet engine to blast the experimental device with air heated to 788 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s just about the temperature that an engine would experience while traveling at Mach 3.3, or 2,532 miles per hour. The device cooled the airstream to a manageable temperature in less than 1/20th of a second, according to the company.

The successful test was “a hugely significant milestone,” Reaction Engines CEO Mark Thomas said in a statement.

Other experts expressed enthusiasm, too.

“It’s very exciting,” Jeffrey Hoffman, an aerospace engineering professor at MIT, said of the successful test. But, he added, “they’re basically trying something that’s very new, pushing materials to extreme limits, and there’s a lot of unknowns in there.”

In future testing, the pre-cooler will be challenged with temperatures even higher than the 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit typical of flight at Mach 5, the threshold for hypersonic flight. And Reaction Engines said craft powered by its cool-as-a-cucumber engine could someday reach speeds of Mach 25, or 16,537 miles per hour, in space. Just not anytime soon, Hoffman warns.

“There’s a long way to go before we’re flying hypersonic vehicles from the surface of the Earth up into orbit,” he said. “We just have to wait and see.”

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Doctor who was dragged, screaming, from United Airlines flight finally breaks silence

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Lindsey Bever April 9

Exactly two years after passenger David Dao was dragged, screaming, from his seat on a United Airlines flight, he has broken his silence, saying he has shed many tears over the incident.

Dao’s case captured worldwide attention in 2017 when he was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, resulting in a concussion, a broken nose and two missing teeth, according to ABC News. Dao, who has not spoken publicly about the incident since it happened, said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good morning America” that when he first saw the video footage, “I just cried.”

Still, Dao said he has forgiven the airline as well as the security agents who dragged him down the aisle and back into the airport terminal.

“I’m not angry with them,” he said. “They have a job to do. They had to do it. If they don’t do it, they must lose their job. So, I’m not angry with them or anything like this.”

[A man wouldn’t leave an overbooked United flight. So he was dragged off, battered and limp.]

Dao said he decided to speak out publicly as a way to thank those who stood behind him.

The doctor said he boarded the plane April 9, 2017, preparing to head home to Kentucky, where he was planning to open a free clinic for U.S. veterans, according to ABC News. He didn’t make it. The flight was overbooked and, when he refused to give up his seat, he was dragged off the plane.

Dao told ABC News that he never expected the encounter to get physical but, once it did, everything escalated “fast.”

Fellow passenger Tyler Bridges told The Washington Post in 2017 that travelers were informed they would be given vouchers to rebook, but when no one agreed, the airline started selecting people and asking them to leave.

The Post’s Avi Selk reported it this way at the time:

A young couple was told to leave first, Bridges recalled. “They begrudgingly got up and left,” he said.

Then an older man, who refused.

“He says, ‘Nope. I’m not getting off the flight. I’m a doctor and have to see patients tomorrow morning,’” Bridges said.

The man became angry as the manager persisted, Bridges said, eventually yelling. “He said, more or less, ‘I’m being selected because I’m Chinese.’”

A police officer boarded. Then a second and a third.

Bridges then began recording, as did another passenger — as the officers leaned over the man, a lone holdout in his window seat.

“Can’t they rent a car for the pilots?” another passenger asks in the videos.

Then the man, out of frame, screams.

One of the officers quickly reaches across two empty seats, snatches the man and pulls him into the aisle.

“My God!” someone yells — not for the first time.

He goes limp after hitting the floor.

“It looked like it knocked him out,” Bridges said. “His nose was bloody.”

His glasses nearly knocked off his face, the man clutches his cellphone as one of the officers pulls him by both arms down the aisle and off the plane.

“This is horrible,” someone says.

“What are you doing? No! This is wrong.”

And with that, Bridges said, four United employees boarded and took the empty seats.

Dao told ABC News on Tuesday that he woke up in a hospital and, for a while, did not know his story had gone viral.

Then, amid widespread outcry, slipping stock prices and a settlement with the airline, he said the media attention became too much for him to handle. “Get to the point, I have to hide,” he told ABC News, explaining that he had to go underground. “I stay for months — months in house.”

United Airlines said in a statement Tuesday to The Post that the incident was “a defining moment” for the company.

“It is our responsibility to make sure we as a company and all of our 90,000 employees continue to learn from that experience,” Megan McCarthy, a spokeswoman for the airline, said in the statement.

“The changes we have implemented since that incident better serve our customers and further empower our employees. This year, we are focused more than ever on our commitment to our customers, looking at every aspect of our business to ensure that we keep their best interests at the center of everything that we do. As our CEO Oscar Munoz has said, we at United never want anyone in the United family to forget the experience of Flight 3411. It makes us a better airline, a more caring company and a stronger team.”

In the interview with ABC News, Dao said he is glad the airline has taken action.

“The most important thing is the accident turned out the positive way,” he said.

Read more:

The full timeline of how social media turned United into the biggest story in the country

FAA meets with pilot unions over Boeing 737 Max

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The FAA grounded the Max 8 and 9 planes on March 14, saying authorities needed to investigate “the possibility of a shared cause” between the two crashes. (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images) Aaron Gregg Michael Laris April 12 at 9:10 PM

Federal Aviation regulators met Friday with pilot representatives from United Airlines, Southwest and American Airlines ― the three U.S. airlines whose fleets include the grounded 737 Max jets ― to discuss a software overhaul and a related set of training requirements designed to make the planes airworthy again.

The meeting was part of a broader soul-searching that has gripped the U.S. aviation community in recent months after two new Boeing jets crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing 346 people.

The FAA grounded the Max 8 and 9 planes on March 14, saying authorities needed to investigate “the possibility of a shared cause” between the two crashes. Although authorities are yet to formally assign blame for either crash, investigators have already concluded that the anti-stalling feature — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — was activated in the final minutes of the Ethiopian flight.

[All eyes are watching as Boeing prepares software update months after Indonesia plane crash]

Pilot unions were angry that they were not made aware of the MCAS issue until after the first crash, and the FAA is still waiting on a final software fix for a flight control system that played a role in both crashes and a related set of pilot training modules.

The FAA is in the spotlight over a 15-year-old policy to allow manufacturers including Boeing to “self-certify” the aircraft they produce. Questions around the certification process for the 737 Max aircraft have been the subject of congressional inquiries and a criminal investigation.

The purpose of Friday’s meeting was to gather data and “to further understand their views as the FAA decides what needs to be done before returning the aircraft to service,” an FAA spokesman said Friday.

FAA acting administrator Daniel Elwell said the meeting had been an opportunity to get regulators on the same page with commercial airline pilots.

“As a pilot myself, as a longtime member of a commercial airline pilot union . . . I understand how important it is to the rank-and-file pilot to understand what the FAA’s doing,” Elwell said in a video released soon after the meeting. “Of course, the flight departments are equally engaged and it’s equally important to speak to them. The one unique aspect of this meeting is bringing them together, so they can hear each other’s questions in real time, and hear our answers in real time.”

[Boeing, initially defensive, now ‘humbled’ by 737 Max crisis]

Earlier this month, Boeing’s chief executive Dennis Muilenburg took the step of directly apologizing for the lives lost on the two doomed flights and acknowledged that MCAS played a role in both tragedies.

In a speech Thursday at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Muilenburg said, “Our top engineers and technical experts have been working tirelessly in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration and our customers to finalize and implement a software update that will ensure accidents like these never happen again.”

Pilot unions from Southwest and American Airlines, in particular, have been critical of Boeing’s role. In a bulletin sent to members after the meeting, Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Jon Weaks said the FAA’s policy of “organization designation authorization,” that allows manufacturers to self-certify should be debated in Congress.

The self-certification policy “may be too ingrained to reverse and further complicated because of the FAA’s budget and lack of available and qualified personnel,” Weaks wrote.

Weaks said discussions will take place around what he called “the very one-sided duopoly that Boeing enjoys and the antitrust issues that accompany this long-overlooked issue,” adding that Boeing should continue to face scrutiny over its flight-control systems and the related certification process.

The FAA is still waiting for Boeing to deliver the final package of software fixes and related training updates that will address the MCAS issue. While the company has been working on the software fix for months, those efforts have been complicated by a new FAA requirement that Boeing fix a separate software problem uncovered more recently.

Boeing executives have said the company is proceeding with caution to ensure the final software and training fixes are satisfactory.

“We’re taking a comprehensive, disciplined approach — and taking the time — to make sure we get it right,” Muilenburg said Thursday in Texas.

Read more:

Ethiopian pilots raised safety concerns years before fatal crash, records show

At tense meeting with Boeing executives, pilots fumed about being left in dark on plane software

United Airlines to fly Star Wars-themed planes for Rise of Skywalker

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Star Wars designs decorate United Airline planes debuting this fall. 


United Airlines

It may not be the Millennium Falcon, but United Airlines plans to debut planes with a Star Wars look this fall. 

During Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, United Airlines said it will introduce special Star Wars-themed livery for its airplanes to promote the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the latest Star Wars movie.

The Star Wars livery will be on United’s fleet of Boeing 737-800 planes.  

“The aircraft will be exploring the ‘domestic galaxy’ and will not be assigned a specific route, meaning customers across the US may have the opportunity to travel on this unique plane,” an United spokesperson told SFGate on Friday. 

As part of the promotion, United is giving away two tickets to the premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

“At United, our mission is to connect people and unite the world, which is exactly what the Star Wars franchise has epically done for more than four decades,” United Airlines said in a statement. 

Fans reacted to the new United Airlines Star Wars plane designs on social media. Wrote one: “That’s cool! Does it sound like a Tie Fighter when it’s flying?”

United Airlines, Lucasfilm and Disney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time airplane livery has promoted Star Wars.

In 2015, Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA) featured BB-8 and R2-D2 designs on the outside of the company’s Boeing 777-300ER wide-body planes and Boeing 767-300 planes in honor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker debuts in theaters worldwide on Dec. 20.

`Flight shame` has Swedes rethinking air travel

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Saddled with long dark winters at home, Swedes have for decades been frequent flyers seeking out sunnier climes, but a growing number are changing their ways because of air travel’s impact on the climate.

“Flygskam”, or flight shame, has become a buzz word referring to feeling guilt over the environmental effects of flying, contributing to a trend that has more and more Swedes, mainly young, opting to travel by train to ease their conscience.

Spearheading the movement for trains-over-planes is Sweden’s own Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate school striker who refuses to fly, travelling by rail to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the climate summit in Katowice, Poland. 

A growing number of public figures have vowed to #stayontheground, including Swedish television skiing commentator Bjorn Ferry who said last year he would only travel to competitions by train.

And 250 people working in the film industry signed a recent article in the country’s biggest daily Dagens Nyheter calling for Swedish film producers to limit shoots abroad.

An anonymous Swedish Instagram account created in December has been shaming social media profiles and influencers for promoting trips to far-flung destinations, racking up more than 60,000 followers.

“I’m certainly affected by my surroundings and (flight shame) has affected how I view flying,” Viktoria Hellstrom, a 27-year-old political science student in Stockholm, told AFP.

Last summer, she took the train to Italy, even though the friends she was meeting there went by plane, as that would have been her second flight within a few weeks.

“The only way I could justify going there was if I took the train,” she said.

Train bookings up

The Scandinavian country’s location far north — it is 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) from the northernmost town of Kiruna to France’s Cote d’Azur — as well as its robust standard of living, the popularity of charter trips and the rise of low-cost airlines have all contributed to making Swedes big flyers.

Researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg last year found that Swedes’ per capita emissions from flying between 1990 and 2017 were five times the global average.

Emissions from Swedes’ international air travel have soared 61 per cent since 1990, their study said. 

Swedes’ concerns rely on solid data: the Swedish Meteorological Institute said last week that the average annual temperature was rising twice as fast in the country as the global average. 

In March, the World Wildlife Foundation published a survey indicating that nearly one in five Swedes had chosen to travel by rail rather than by air in order to minimise their environmental impact.

The trend was most noticeable among women and young people, it said.

Meanwhile, a survey published Tuesday in Sweden’s leading travel magazine Vagabond said 64 per cent of those who travelled abroad less last year did so because of climate reasons.

National rail operator SJ reported a 21 per cent boost in business travel this winter, and the government has announced plans to reintroduce night trains to major European cities before the end of its mandate in 2022.

The number of domestic flight passengers was projected to be down by 3.2 per cent in 2018, the transport authority said in its latest figures from September, though the number of passengers on international flights rose four per cent.

So far the “flight shame” trend hasn’t had the same traction among Sweden’s neighbours, although Finland has spawned its own version of the expression, calling it “lentohapea”.

Is ‘flight shame’ real?

Other parts of the developed world may not have a word that’s quite as catchy — making do with #flyingless or #stopflying — but average CO2 emissions of 285 grams per air kilometre, compared with 158 for cars and 14 for trains, have given many pause.

Fausta Gabola, a French-Italian student in Paris, is no longer sure that she should take up an offer to study in Australia on a scholarship.

“It’s my dream to go there,” she told AFP. “I applied without thinking too much about it and now I have a dilemma. I would feel like a hypocrite if I went.”

French political scientist Mathilde Szuba said any no-fly decision effectively puts distant countries out of reach.

“There is no easy substitute for flying,” she told AFP. “You can’t go to faraway places without taking the plane.”

Back in Sweden, some experts say that changing travel patterns are not always a direct result of “flight shame”.

Frida Hylander, a Swedish psychologist, said shame, and the fear of being shamed, was a powerful motivator, but she also cautioned against overstating its importance.

Other factors were at play, Hylander said, citing as an example Sweden’s unusually hot summer last year which caused massive wildfires and may have sparked wider concerns about climate change.

“You should exercise caution when pointing to one single factor,” Hylander said.

A new flight tax introduced in April 2018 may also have played a role, she said, as well as the bankruptcy of regional airline NextJet, which led to the closure of a number of domestic flight routes for several months.

Why Are We So Hellbent on Making Air Travel Suck?

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Photo: John Walton (Twitter)

Air travel sucks. It’s often the cheapest and most efficient way to get from one point to another, but the process is riddled with long lines, frustrating fees, grumpy people, overpriced food—you name it. So why are we trying to make air travel actively worse?

My question is inspired by the Aviointeriors Skyrider 3.0 seats, which debuted at the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2019 in Hamburg, Germany. I didn’t want to write about this terrible concept, but I have also been completely unable to stop thinking about it since I saw it.

In essence, the Aviointeriors Skyrider 3.0 seats are designed for maximizing the amount of people who can cram onto an airplane. The concept itself is terrible (are there not enough people on planes already???) but the way engineers have solved this problem is by creating even smaller seats that closely resemble bike seats. You know, the things infamous for making your butt hurt if you sit on ‘em too long. The passengers legs would be left to hang in the air like someone on a roller coaster, not a flight.

The point of these seats is, supposedly, twofold. The new seat is both a more efficient use of space than the current seat, and it’s also designed to add another flight class which Gaetano Perugini, engineering adviser at Aviointeriors said will be an “innovation for the airline and the passenger,” according to CNN.

The point, then, isn’t to totally replace our current economy seats with the Skyriders. It’s to create a whole separate class for these seats, an “ultra-basic economy,” that will be cheaper for the customer and allow the airline to squish more people onto a plane.

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I, a rampant nihilist, reject the positives of claim.

Airlines have been narrowing seat for years under the guise of this same logic. If we make seats smaller, we can fit more people into them and thus can offer cheaper flights. Given that budget airlines like Spirit and Frontier often have the cheapest ticket offerings and the smallest seats, it makes sense at face value.

The Skyrider seats are a mere 23 inches long—and that’s at it’s longest part between your legs. There’s also that whole “bike seat” configuration to be dealt with. Those who are well-endowed in the posterior region are probably not going to have their entire ass fully on this seat.

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There isn’t a universal standard for how big seats are in planes, but you can use SeatGuru to explore how big seats on certain airlines and certain planes are. The current smallest seat is 28 inches, which you’ll find on Spirit, Frontier, Air Canada and other economy flights. If you think that five inch difference is hardly noticeable, then you have likely not flown very much. I’m not the most perceptive or picky person when it comes to flying, but even I noticed when JetBlue cut their seat size by two inches.

The Federal Aviation Administration has opted against limiting how small seats can get as recently as 2018, as reported by NPR. They’ve argued that there’s no evidence that smaller seats are more dangerous in terms of making it more difficult for passengers to maneuver the plane or evacuate in case of an emergency.

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The FAA, though, neglects to take into account all the other factors that make air travel suck as bad as it does. There are health concerns—think deep vein thrombosis, the so-called “economy-class syndrome” that results from long periods of immobility and cramped legs. Think about armrest hogs or the grumpy people who are pointedly miserable to sit next to for any amount of time, and how they’ll now be all that much closer. Think about how Americans are increasingly putting on weight. It seems cruel to ignore basic comfort in the name of economic efficiency.

There are plenty of reasons why plane tickets cost so much these days. But in my eyes, finding answers to creating more efficiency shouldn’t come at the expense of the passenger. With so much awesome technology coming to the fore in the automotive world, it’s high time for the aviation industry to start working on newer, better ways to deliver the same travel we’ve grown to love (or hate).

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The Skyrider bike-style seats would probably be fine for the short flights they are designed for. I could see myself enduring one for quick flights from San Antonio to Dallas, or even from Philadelphia to Toronto if I was truly desperate. Anything longer than that, and I’d probably be ready to light something on fire. And I have no idea how very tall, very short, or anyone with any weight on them at all would be able to endure any amount of time in one of these things.

We already have bag fees, seat fees, change fees, snack fees—you name it. Air travelers are already shelling out the money. We shouldn’t also be expected to pay for the normal human need of comfort.