There was a time when air travel was something special. Passengers would dress up in tailored suits and fancy hats. Airlines strived to make the time in the air as pleasurable as possible, with cost-free amenities and thoughtful, personal attention. Flying was actually something people looked forward to doing.

Most of today’s air travelers aren’t fortunate enough to have such cherished memories of floating comfortably above the clouds. That’s because, for three-plus decades, the commercial airline experience has been in a steep and steady decline. Nowadays, passengers board planes dressed as angry hobos anticipating agony and torment. Much of the time, the airlines live down to those expectations.

But who would have ever thought that things would sink so low as the events of the past few weeks suggest?

We refer to the now-
infamous “knee defender,” a simple plastic device that prevents airline passengers from reclining their seats. It’s installed on tray tables by passengers to keep from having their faces squashed when travelers in front of them push their back seats to do things like knit or sleep.

Three times in recent weeks, seat wars have led to in-air incidents that have required flights to be diverted or air marshals to intervene. The most publicized incident involved a businessman flying to Denver whose use of the device culminated in the woman in front of him throwing a soda in his face. The plane was then rerouted to Chicago, and the two passengers were not allowed to continue their journey on the same airline.

In another case, on a flight to Paris, undercover sky marshals had to step in quell a “knee defender” dispute that ended with an angry passenger grabbing a flight attendant.

Much of the misplaced “knee defender” attention has focused on the device and the unruly behavior of passengers using it to stake claims on limited cabin space. While unruly behavior cannot be condoned, it can surely be understood, considering the conditions most passengers are required to endure.

What do airlines expect when, in the words of the Denver-bound businessman, they essentially sell “the same space twice”? Airlines are asking for confrontation when they sell tickets that include the expectation that passengers can recline their seats without consideration for the people behind them, who bought their tickets with the expectation they would have enough space to put cups to their faces.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The “knee defender” exists because, in the absence of appreciation of their plight, thousands of disgruntled airline passengers felt the need to fight back.

Who can blame them? Anyone who flies knows that coach service has become something akin to what life was like on the Nina, the Pinta and Santa Maria. Airlines have jammed more and more people into claustrophobic spaces by reducing leg room and making seats thinner than a communion wafer. By comparison, John Glenn’s seat in Friendship 7 was a penthouse suite.

Since the airlines created the problem, it’s their responsibility to solve it. The pie-in-the-sky solution is to take out a couple of rows of coach seats so passengers are assured of satisfying reasonable expectations of comfort without fear of being assaulted, detained, arrested or placed on a “no-fly” list.

But we all know that’s not going to happen. In the highly competitive airline business, companies must scrounge for every dollar of revenue. A reasonable solution would be for all airlines to do what Spirit Airline does – restrict seats from reclining. That would ensure all passengers have the same space in which to enjoy their trip and thus eliminate the need for “knee defenders” and the confrontations they cause.