According to this report from the Wall Street Journal, airline seats are steadily shrinking. Not content with treating people like cattle, airlines now want to treat them like sardines, as they cram 10 seats into each row in economy, instead of the standard (and already horribly cramped) nine. This plan has two goals: Firstly, to squeeze more people onto each flight (like, duh). Secondly, and more insidiously, it’s because they’re deliberately trying to make people hate flying economy so much that they shell out triple the regular price for a first class ticket (the obvious flaw in the logic here being that if we could all afford to fly business class in the first place, we would fucking fly business class in the first place, you fucking shit-bag morons). The upshot is that the majority of airplane seats will be a piddling 17 inches wide in the near future, which, considering the width of the average American ass, is pretty distressing. Still, it’s not like an airline to give two shits about its passengers, so to save them the trouble, here are some more suggestions for how they can make our lives hell while saving themselves a few pennies.
- To save wear and tear on tires, planes will no longer land. Instead, they will be refueled in mid-air, while passengers enter and exit via a 200-foot rope ladder extended from the landing gear. Any luggage that cannot be carried in the teeth will not be allowed onboard.
- To make room for more seats, the onboard bathrooms will be removed entirely. Passengers will be expected to simply hold it in until their destination, a feat made more difficult by the budget-sparing measure of replacing all traditional airline food with cheap-to-produce bran muffins and instant coffee. Expect to see much more use being made of those little oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling.
- To disguise the squalor of their cabins and airport terminals, airlines will begin a joint program with the CIA, known as “Rendition Air.” This will see passengers kidnapped from their homes, knocked unconscious, driven to the airport with a bag over their head, then strapped into a small metal chair for the duration of the flight while someone completely fails to explain the content of the Geneva Convention. The plane will only land after every passenger signs a confession to something they didn’t do, at which point, they are dropped off at their destination with no apology. In a surprise twist ending, this will still receive higher scores in passenger reviews than current standard economy flights.
Photos by Jason Hetherington / Getty Images | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2013