Travel Minute — Putting Airline Seats on a Diet

How much could an airline save a year if each seat on a plane weighed six pounds less?  You’d be surprised.

According to Southwest Airlines, installing seats six pounds lighter than their current seats will save $10 million a year in fuel costs.  And even though American Airlines became the target of jokes a couple of decades ago when it removed on olive from every salad to lighten planes, the plain fact is, every extra pound requires a little more gas to move an aircraft through the sky.

So Southwest is re-doing the interior of its planes.  The airline says seats will be sleeker, which means less padding.  They’ll recline two inches instead of the present three.  And there’ll be more room under each seat to stow luggage.

It will also allow Southwest to add one more row—or six seats—to each plane, and that’s a second profit center.  To get that many additional seats otherwise, Southwest says, it would have had to spend $600 million to buy 16 new planes.  However, the airline vows that wasn’t what prompted the renovation.  But that is one heck of an extra benefit.