February 4th, 2014
The great Mollie Hemingway has heroically set forth some tentative social rules for seat reclining on airplanes. I’m in favor of them all.
Reclining your seat in an airplane isn’t the worst breach of etiquette in the traveling worlds. It’s not talking in the Quiet Car or showing up to dinner in jean shorts on the at-sea night. But it’s pretty bad. Just because airplane seats recline, doesn’t mean they should be reclined any time. And there out to be some generally-shared consensus on when it’s polite to do so.
For my own part, I never mind if the person in front of me reclines and they’re really big. Last week on a cross-country flight the guy in the seat in front of me was probably 6’6″. I kept waiting for him to push his seat back and I wouldn’t have held it against him, but he never did. Ditto for red eye flights, when most people are expecting to sleep.
At the other end of the spectrum are the times when a normal-sized person reclines immediately upon take-off, yet jabbers back and forth with their seat-mate for the whole flight. These folks don’t need the extra room and aren’t using it to aid sleep–they’re just taking it, because they can.
I don’t know where this sort of thing fits in the hierarchy of assaults on civilization, but it probably clocks somewhere around talking in movies. [Cue Santino rant in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .]
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Quit baiting me, JVL.
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This is where I am.
I would prefer seats not recline at all. My knees pretty much always touch the seat in front to start with. When the person in front of me reclines, it just takes away the little space I’ve got.
I never recline my seat because why would I do that to someone?
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I want to hear a story about Bunch forcibly moving the reclined seat in front of him back to its upright position, then everyone on the twitterverse subjecting him to the “two minutes hate”. Then the twitterverse reverses the two minutes hate because the recliner turned out to be a prominent conservative celebrity and the twitterverse is ground zero for the “politicized life”.
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You’ll notice big guys are generally nicer and more considerate to throwing themselves around: not because we’re better* but simply because we’ve been told we’re taking up so much space from everyone, parents included. People who are 6’3″ are the best: big enough to be aware of their bigness, not so big that they can’t help taking up room and knocking your seat over. And we’re all geniuses, while those 6’4″ and above are just big dumb lugs and 6’2″ are just tiny people of no account anyway on account of being small.
* -Although we are better than short people, who ain’t got nobody. To love.
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Some of us don’t need the leg room; we need the floor room. So we can abdicate the “comfort” of our seats to sit on the floor, rocking side to side and trying to pretend that takeoff-and-landing screaming sound from under the giraffe blanket has nothing whatsoever to do with us.
Trumwill February 4, 2014 at 12:23 pm
I’m 6’5″ and I never recline my seat if there is someone sitting behind me (which is almost always the case these days). I think in large part because I am 6’5″ and so hate it when the person in front of me reclines that the thought of reclining myself is just anathema.