The Federal Aviation Administration will conduct an investigation into whether airplane seats have gotten unsafely small and closely spaced, The Washington Post reports.
The FAA’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City will conduct tests this November to decide how small airplane seats can be, as well as how close the rows of seats can get, in order to meet federal regulations which require that planes can be evacuated in 90 seconds or less.
The agency said in a statement that it must “issue regulations to establish minimum dimensions for airplane seat width, length and pitch that are necessary for the safety of passengers,” and that the FAA should finish its testing to “determine what, if any, regulatory changes are necessary to implement the requirement” by the end of the year.
“A bad outcome would be for them to keep the seats essentially as they are or even allow them to shrink further,” Flyers Rights, a non-profit that aids airline passengers, president Paul Hudson told the Post. “A good outcome would be for them to require the seats and passenger space be sized in order to accommodate the demographic profiles that we now have.”
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