Airline legroom

[Kip Powick]

Airline legroom battles escalate:

Quick! Who has more legroom … discount carriers or the traditional legacy carriers? If you answered discounters, you are correct. "Struggling higher cost airlines have cut their service so deeply that low-fare carriers offer superior service such as in-flight entertainment and leather seats," writes Scott McCartney, The Middle Seat columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

He continues: "The turnabout now extends to legroom, as discounters like JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines offer more than the older airlines." Indeed, as many of the legacy carriers put seats back into planes to try to staunch losses, the legroom edge has tilted to the discounters.

Who has the most in economy class? United's "Economy Plus" is the tops, McCartney reports, though that seating section is generally reserved for full-fare paying customers or the airlines elite-level frequent fliers. Economy Plus features a 36-inch "seat pitch," or the measure of the distance from one point on the seat to the same point on the seat in front of it.

Following United's Economy Plus, however, were a long list of non-traditional carriers: JetBlue, Delta's Song, Frontier, Midwest and Southwest. At the bottom of McCartney's list? Northwest, whose seat-pitch on its DC9-30 jets is just 30 inches. And, of course, there was last month's legroom brouhaha between United and American, in which United launched a whole ad campaign targeting AA's seating space.