Want to be guaranteed an open seat next to you on your next American Airlines flight? There’s a way you can do it without buying two seats when you’re flying on a 737-800MCE aircraft. All you need to do is book a seat in rows 16 or 17, which are located directly behind the exit rows. See this SeatGuru.com seat map.
How is that possible, you ask? Some economics geek must have figured out that American could save some money if they took away four seats. I know that doesn’t make any sense but the 737-800MCE is outfitted with 154 seats, which means the airline is required to have four flight attendants. The FAA states: “For airplanes having a seating capacity of more than 100passengers—two flight attendants plus one additional flight attendant for each unit (or part of a unit) of 50 passenger seats above a seating capacity of 100 passengers.”
That means by physically disabling four seats (they removed the seatbelts and installed plastic consoles in the middle seats) they could legally have three flight attendants work instead of four.
You would think a flight attendant’s salary wouldn’t come close to four paying tickets but since flight loads average 82.8% and not 100% there are usually some empty seats (before they get filled with non-rev passengers).
So there you have it! The airlines figured out another way to make money and eight savvy passengers can use it to their advantage to get more space at no extra cost.
Posted this recently myself…and an AA FA reported that the FAA is still requiring four FAs on these flights…I know there were 4 on my flight…not sure what the current status is….
Very clever. Thanks for sharing!
Great tip. As an aside: I am not sure what I am looking at with that disembodied leg in the picture there?
That’s my leg! I sat there for a second before switching to an empty exit row
How long has this FAA rule been in effect? With the sophisticated yield management systems airlines use for pricing seats, it seems they would have thought about this when initially configuring seat map.
Good question! But I have no idea
The one flight attendant per 50 passenger rule has been around for a long, long time. It is also part of why JetBlue put in their extra leg room seats, cutting the total number of passengers to 150 per A320 several years ago. They went from 4->3 flight attendants as part of that move.
Great tip! Never knew about this. Definitely good to know as I always seem to get stuck next to someone who likes to hog the arm rest or elbow me the whole time :)
So I can sit next to my girlfriend without actually sitting next to her, I love it!
Still laughing!!!
Great tip! But is AA the only airline to do this?
It’s the only one I’ve seen
Wow this is something completely new to me, nothing worse than a long uncomfortable trip being stuck in the wrong seat, great tip!
great tip!
this is genuine..! never would have thought.. .thanks !
I just heard about this myself when my mom asked me about it on her flight last week! Random.
And i think the other commenter meant that ‘leg’ in the top right of the photo. At first it looks odd like they stuck it out intentionally until you see that the person has it over their other leg! See you in Toronto?
Hi Johnny, I noticed in the seatguru website that one of the JetBlue aircrafts is also missing a seat, but just one in the right side (row 18). It doesn’t seem it was done for the same reason as it has less than a hundred seats. Any idea why they did it, besides giving a whole sit of leg room th the passenger behind it?
http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/JetBlue_Airways/Jetblue_Airways_Airbus_A321_transcon.php
Just occurred to me that maybe the pilot is seating at the left side and they are balancing the plane :) Hope that’s not it.
Those rows 16 and 17 have very limited legroom. I much prefer the MCE rows.
I was randomly assigned one of these seats last month and was wondering what the purpose was. At first I thought the middle seat must have been broken, but then I realized the row in front of mine had that too. Now I know!