There is a fact that many passengers on commercial flights have realized: some people are lucky enough to sit in a good position with a window inside the cabin to enjoy the vast sky, while others are not so fortunate and cannot see anything.
In the other case, when you board a plane and are ready for takeoff, the flight attendant asks you to lower the window shade, but you realize that your seat doesn't have any windows. Why is that?
The reason seats aren't aligned with windows is profitability
The YouTube channel "Today I Found Out" recently uploaded a video explaining this issue.
Airlines do not randomly arrange their seats. The answer to the question of why the seats are not aligned with the windows is profitability.
Driven by profitability, airlines always try to maximize the number of seats in each cabin
According to the explanation provided by the YouTube channel, there is no specific standard for seat arrangements on airplanes.
Airlines have the freedom to change the design of the seats, the number of seats, and the quantity of rows in a cabin. They do this to maximize profits.
Therefore, they always choose the most advantageous seating arrangements.
Additionally, many passengers prefer to sit in pairs, so airlines often choose an even number of seats in a row (2 or 4) to fill the cabin.
However, airlines like American Airlines often choose a wider cabin design with a 2+5+2 configuration because they believe it maximizes the number of passengers, filling up to 70% of the cabin on each flight.
The increasing number of seats depends on the width of the cabin. Then, they reduce the distance between seats.
Based on international standards, this distance should be around 38-40 cm, but many airlines keep it at 31 cm or even 28 cm.
The standard distance also happens to be the distance between consecutive windows in the cabin. Due to this reason, the seats and windows are rarely aligned.
It should be noted that according to international aviation standards, the standard design is to have seats and windows aligned.
However, very few airlines implement this standard due to the lower profitability when reducing the number of seats.
