The middle seat - to block or not to block?

Every night I write and send out a Covid19 / aviation related newsletter to thousands of travel industry subscribers, on behalf of SimpliFlying. This is an amended version of last night's lead story. You can subscribe to the newsletter (for free) here.

Should airlines be keeping the middle seat free to enforce some kind of social distancing? Is social distancing on planes even possible? Should you be doing it just for the optics? This is of course an on-going debate within the airline industry.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary for example calls it ‘’idiotic’’, warning that he won’t fly his aircraft if there is such a rule.

Some airlines are however blocking the middle seats off. For example, yesterday JetBlue promised to keep the seat free in cases where a group isn’t travelling together. 

As part of it’s ‘safety from the ground up’ initiative, the airline says that you won’t be seated beside someone you don’t know, instead the middle seat will be kept empty, or on the Embraer E-190, the aisle seat will be vacant.

Does this serve any practical purpose and is it sustainable? Qantas CEO Alan Joyce says no. According to ABC, Joyce said that leaving the middle seat empty, is ‘’not social distancing, it's a 60-centimetre difference between two people.’’

Alan Joyce says that actual social distancing is pretty much impossible on board - "To get the 4 metres squared, you'll end up with 22 people on an aircraft of 180 seats … and the airfares are nine to 10 times as much."

Clearly he is right. You might be leaving the middle seat free, but there are still going to be people within coughing distance, all around you - very often right behind you.

So this is really all about reassurance - and most flights are more than half empty anyway, which means many airlines can do it for now.

As a result, isn't the fact that it makes people feel better, a good enough reason?

Short term PR gain, but long term pain

No, because of the wider message that it sends. Here's yet another tweet that I saw this morning along the lines of 'OMG, look at all these people packed up right next to me, we're all going to get Covid19!'

By leaving the middle seat free, you are reinforcing the illusion that social distancing on aircraft is possible, when as Alan Joyce points out, it really isn't. Not unless you give people whole blocks of rows to themselves and increase fares ten fold.

You are also fuelling the impression that anyone sitting next to you is a potential danger, which leads to all sorts of air rage problems. See for example this piece by Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who described a recent flight in the US where his seat neigbour tried to prevent him taking his seat by blocking the row entrance with his leg.

Those expectations and perceptions will then remain in place until a vaccine is found and mass produced - which may not be for another twelve months yet - making it hard to row back on the policy without facing a passenger backlash.

As we've argued before, passenger reassurance needs to happen prior to someone setting foot on an aircraft. By the time they sit down and start eyeing up their fellow passengers as potential virus spreaders, it's too late.