Attn LCCs: WTF else do you want?

So people give LCCs (low cost carriers) a rash of shit.  And you know what?  It’s worth it.  RyanAir wants to charge people £1 or €1 to use the onboard bathroom, and wants to take away most bathrooms onboard to make room for more seats.  Spirit Air first infuriated everyone by wanting to charge up to $45 for carryon bags.  Now, there is a new headline — but the true story is beneath it.

So the headline over at the Orlando Sentinel is that two of Spirit’s new airliners do not have seats that recline.  That’s the big complaint for the reporter of the story.  But the REAL story, in my humble opinion, is that the seat pitch — the distance from one spot on an airline seat to the exact same spot on the seat behind it (the reporter mis-defines seat pitch in their story as something else) — has been decreased to 28″.  SeatGuru.com said on Twitter,

Spirit Airlines introduces no recline seats and 28″ seat pitch. The new Ryanair of the US?

Dude!  Even RyanAir gives their passengers 30″ of pitch on their planes!  I remember getting on a KLM Intra-European flight one time that had 30″ pitch, and felt that I had no room to put my bag at my feet, much less sit comfortably for the few hours I had to spend going from Geneva to Amsterdam.  I cannot even begin to fathom taking two MORE inches away from that seat.  You aren’t going to be able to get in and out of your row at all anymore; you’re going to have to crawl across the seats.

It’s going to be interesting to see what the FAA and other Federal regulators say about this.  Airlines, as a safety standpoint, MUST get all passengers off a plane within 90 seconds.  With the idiots that waste time trying to get their bags and take with them, and with the piss-stained wheelchair seat grannies, coupled with this new 28″ pitch row of seats, HOW in the HELL is 90 seconds still going to be possible?

So LCCs.  WTF else do you want?  First born?  You want female passengers to harvest their eggs and male passengers to provide sperm so you can make a little money on the side with artificial insemination to folks?  You want pints of blood to sell on the black market?  You’re crossing into bad territory here; once you cross that line, it’s done.