Reclining your airplane seat is generally fine. Retaliating against recliners is not
Timothy P. Carney
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Airlines bring you hundreds or thousands of miles in a really short amount of time, which is why people fly. That is, people don’t fly for a pleasant travel experience. Airlines value economy more than passengers value comfort, which results in somewhat cramped cabins.
Cramped cabins, in turn, result in occasional strife. One specific area of strife that gets hotly debated involves reclining one’s seat.
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Walsh’s position, that it is never acceptable to recline one’s seat, is a widely held one. Anti-recliners occasionally resort to harassing or attacking recliners or in fact preventing them from reclining. The video above shows a recliner who believes the person behind her was shoving her seat in retaliation for her reclining.
Some people have brought a “seat defender” onto the plane, which physically blocks the person from reclining. Others have told flight attendants to enforce a no-recline rule.
The anti-recliners’ argument is that reclining infringes on the space of the person behind them. I think recliners tend to exaggerate the infringement — for instance, claiming that reclining bangs your seat back into the person’s legs. Walsh, in his tweet, overstates things when he says that the reclined-into person can’t use his tray table.
I agree that working on my laptop is difficult when the person in front of me reclines. Also, reclining can rattle the person’s tray table and potentially spill their drink. Finally, the person in back does lose some headroom — but can regain that headroom by reclining himself.
So how to resolve this?
First, if one’s seat reclines, one has the right to recline. Someone who tries to stop a recliner with hardware or by pushing back is obviously way out of line. Someone who retaliates against a recliner by jostling or pushing the seat or in any other way is obviously way out of line.
This is the simplest and most obvious truth in this entire discussion: It is never OK to harass someone for reclining or physically try to stop someone from reclining.
The rest of the discussion isn’t quite as simple because rights are not the only considerations when the question is: What ought we to do?
Here’s where Walsh is correct: Just because you have every right to do something doesn’t mean it’s perfectly fine for you to do it. I’ve written about this regarding trading seats on a plane.
So what would a courteous flyer do?
For starters, don’t recline when a person is behind you unless you really would get a lot of benefit out of it. Basically, I only recline if I believe it will make it easier for me to fall asleep. Some people’s back pain might be alleviated by reclining, and that’s a good reason to do so. But if I’m just reading or writing, which is what I normally do except on trans-Atlantic flights, I just don’t recline if someone is behind me.
Why not? Because I try to be a nice guy. That should be a guiding rule: Try to be a nice guy.
Second, if I am going to recline with a person behind me, I check with them. I try to make sure they don’t have a meal or a drink on their tray. If they have a big old laptop, I probably won’t recline unless I really need to sleep, in which case I may apologize and tell the person, “Sorry, but I really need to sleep now, so I’m going to recline.”
At that point, it’s possible the person will say, “I’m on deadline for a work thing on my giant laptop. Would you mind not reclining?” In that case, I would revert to try to be a nice guy, and I would offer up my discomfort for a while.
Travel blogger Gary Leff proposes a way to settle it: Money. He posits that the recliner has an absolute right to recline, and so the anti-recliner should try to bribe the recliner not to recline.
“Politely negotiate with the reclining passenger,” he counsels the person inconvenienced by the reclining. “It is their right, so figure out how important it is to you that they keep their seat upright and offer to pay them up to that amount.”