Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
I'd be interested in seeing how that was worked out.
And the definition of "incredibly low probability".
The probability is small and gets smaller if you look at a single particular pair of seats: those closer to the left door plug. Even if we add constraints like all aisle seats being occupied and all empty seats being in coach class it would still be small. I'll take a stab at computing the probability with those constraints:
46 window and 46 middle seats for coach, so 92 seats that can be empty with my constraints. The chance for the window seat to be empty is 7/92. Once that seat is empty, the chance that the seat adjacent to it is also empty is 6 out of the remaining 91 seats. So, to compute the probability for the two events together, we multiply 7/92 by 6/91. Which is almost exactly 0.005. Just 0.5%. Or 1 in 200 flights.
And, if we remove my initial constraints, the probability gets even lower. We would have 7 empty seats out of 178. So the probability becomes 7/178 multiplied by 6/177, which is around 0.13%, or one in 750 flights.
I've booked seats at music gigs that were very nearly sold out
The chances of there being remaining seats adjacent to each other don't seem to be particularly small.
Not sure about those music gigs, but in cinemas, when choosing the seats by yourself, they usually do not allow you to leave a single empty seat between you and other occupied seats, to prevent ending up with one sit gaps in an occupied row, which would prevent couples from booking the last few seats if they want to be next to each other.
Now, if Alaska had some similar constraints for similar reasons, yes, the probability of finding 2 adjacent empty seats would be higher than what I computed above. Assuming they would try their best to group those 7 empty seats in pairs of two when booking, we would have 3 pairs of 2 seats and a separate empty seat. So, with the constraints I gave earlier, you would have 3 chances out of 46 to have them near the left plug. Or around 6.5%, one in 15 flights. Still low, but better than the 0.5% or 0.13% computed earlier.