Up, up, and away

According to news reports, Southwest Air has ordered over 300 new airplanes from Boeing. There will be numerous improvements over existing planes, officials say. Windows in the new planes will be bigger, allowing passengers a better view. The planes will be more fuel efficient. Overhead bins will be larger, enabling passengers to pack even more items in their carryon bags, such as their entire seasonal wardrobe PLUS all the amenities from the resort they just left (including the chef and butler).   


And recognizing that, in general, today's passengers are somewhat larger than in the past and therefore need additional room in their seats to be comfortable, engineers have made the seats...smaller. 


Officials stress that passengers will NOT notice that their seats are smaller. One reason for this is that "the seats are closer to the ground." Possibly the thinking is that passengers will be so preoccupied with the fact that they are sitting mere inches from the floor that they will fail to realize that their seat has shrunk.


Another reason smaller seats won't matter, the airline says, is that the seats are tilted slightly, allowing more room where passengers need it most (the body part in question is left unspecified here for reasons of delicacy).


One change that allowed seats to be smaller -- and saved the airline a lot of money -- is the absence of any flotation device under the seat. The big, bulky cushion has been replaced by a much smaller and more efficient safety item, which I have now forgotten but recall roughly as being a 3 x 5 index card with a simple prayer written on it, in several languages, and the instructions "ACTIVATE IN EMERGENCY." In an actual emergency, of course, many passengers would spontaneously follow these instructions anyway, with no prompting, but because of federal regulations the airline had to provide some sort of emergency safety device.


Because the new seats are smaller, the airline was able to fit MORE seats on the plane. Having more passengers unfortunately cancels out the extra overhead luggage space, which means that you won't be able to take home your personal chef OR butler after all.  


Officials have not said exactly how they arrived at these decisions. But passenger input is no doubt important to a company such as Southwest. We can therefore speculate that before settling on the plane specifications, the airlines led several rounds of focus groups to find out what passengers wanted on new planes. After duly considering participants' suggestions, officials probably had a hearty laugh among themselves and dismissed the groups.


Another improvement passengers may not notice, though not officially reported by the airline, is updated cockpit equipment that allows pilots to merely pretend to be flying the plane while in actuality engaging in joking, playing video games, sleeping, updating their Facebook pages, etc.


Question: This is different from the way planes are presently flown HOW?


Answer: In no way whatsoever. That is why you will not notice the improvement.


Passengers can take comfort in knowing that SOME things will not change. Flight attendants will continue to hand out peanut bags that contain exactly six peanuts. Restrooms on board will continue to be roughly the size of a manilla envelope, and any beverage consumed on board will take half as long to go through your system as it does on land, making the envelope-size restroom extremely popular.


On the whole, the new planes shouldn't be TOO bad. In the event of something happening, at least we'll be closer to the floor of the airplane.