Congress set to finally push back against shrinking airline seats

[SeenItAll]

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/seat-act-congress-finally-set-push-back-shrinking-airline-seats-194843416.html

Gist of article is that because of recent publicity about airline misbehavior against passengers, they don't have the juice to lobby against this bill to kill it. Further, the basis for the proposed regulation of minimum seat width and pitch is due to concerns that evacuation tests have not been run with these high density configurations.

While I am not sure that the latter argument is correct, because certification requires evacuation of maximum permitted Pax capacity, one thing that I do wonder about is whether evacuation tests assume that no Pax tries to bring along their carry-ons. Since it always occurs that a significant fraction do try to pull their carry-ons from the overhead and take them with them, it would seem reasonable for evacuation tests to require a significant fraction of Pax to take their carry-ons.

[Volume]

You can try as hard to simulate a real emergency situation, but you will never be able to simulate people in fear of their life, and you probably do not want to, as we would probably see severely injured or even people killed during such tests.
Tests and simulations are great to compare different situations (i.e. evacuating a single aisle aircraft versus a widebody), but will never give you absolute results.
Current tests seem to deliver acceptable designs, aircraft which pass this test did proof in real accidents that evacuation of such aircraft works.
Seat density alone may not be the issue, on the contrary, if people leave their seat slower, they may block aisles and doors less, the overall number of people per minute and door may even increase.

[Tinstaafl]

Bear in mind that pax evac must be demonstrated at whatever capacity is desired. An airline can't just decide to add another 20 seats to whatever the plane was certified with without demonstrating the required evac. time.

Also the pax. evac. is done with objects blocking the aisle(s) and with 50% of the exits unavailable.

Doesn't make the narrow bloody seats anymore comfortable though.