![]() That may help a bit to ease the feeling of claustrophobia but nothing can bring mercy to those “densified” seats. ![]() Boeing has come up with an ingenious trompe l’oeil re-styling of the cabin called Sky Interior that sculpts the ceiling and bins to give a more spacious feeling and the windows are 20 percent larger. To meet that total of seats for 230 passengers in the 737MAX 10 the rows are going to be as close together as 28 inches – that’s the space from one seatback to the next or, as I would prefer to call it, the knees-in-your-face space.Īnd consider the optics of that tube. Now, just think about what these numbers mean in terms of both the airline accountant’s dream and the passenger’s nightmare. The first version of the 737 had a fuselage that was 94 feet long the second was 100 feet long the third 109 feet the fourth 138 feet 2 inches and the fourth – as in the 737MAX 10 – is 143 feet 8 inches long.Īs the tube got longer and longer it held more and more rows of seats: the first 737 had seats for 124 passengers the second 136 the third 149 and the latest an astonishing 230 passengers – nearly twice as many as in the original. And so the cabin was incrementally stretched to lengths unforeseen by the original designers. That was possible because jet engines became more powerful. The only way to meet that demand was to make the cabin longer…and longer…and longer. ![]() The 737’s seats remain limited to the original width but the airlines have demanded more and more rows of them. But, as everybody knows, since the 1960s Americans have grown wider while the seats have not. With three seats on each side of the single aisle that means the tightest possible seat width, about 17 inches. Many upgrades have been made to the design, the most significant in the mid-1990’s with new wings and avionics, but one thing has never changed - and it is the thing that most influences the passengers’ experience - the size of the fuselage and, therefore, the limits of its cabin comforts.Ĭritically, it concerns what was deemed in 1964 to be the ideal width for a single-aisle cabin, 11 feet 6 inches. Astoundingly, the 737 continues on and on and on and on…the greatest cash cow in Boeing’s long history. The 707 and 727 have long passed into respected museum pieces. And then, in 1964, in order to stave off competition, it rushed ahead with an even smaller jet, the 737, designed for shorter inter-city routes. It followed that with the smaller trijet, the 727, for domestic routes. However, before I get into the excruciating physical details there is a story to be told, one of the most extraordinary origin stories in the history of commercial aviation.īack in the 1960s Boeing began its early domination of the jet age with the intercontinental 707.
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