This page presents legroom and fare information for NONSTOP flights to Europe originating from Dulles or Baltimore-Washington International airports. It will help the long-shanked find seats that are more comfortable yet affordable. I am 6'4" and I spent an uncomfortable eight hours in an economy seat with 31 inches of legroom on a summer 1996 flight to Europe. There are other pages on the internet that suggest stratagems to follow when one doesn't have enough room. I found these tricks to be unreliable. I update this once or twice a year, yielding peak season and off-peak versions. This is more than sufficient, since while the airlines fiddle with fares all the time, seat spacing is relatively eternal, despite the trivial nature of the work involved in moving seats.
While this web site concentrates on flights out of the Washington, DC, area, it can help transatlantic travelers using other airports. Airlines use a few plane configurations on their long distance flights, so knowing the type of aircraft will tell you the legroom story. I limited my research to direct flights because I can deal with a cramped seat on the final stage. My experience is that the short legs are usually less crowded.
I requested generic economy class fare information for flights leaving in the afternoon on Friday, July 11, returning on July 25, with a 21-day advance purchase. The cheapest generic flights are 21-day advance purchase, nonrefundable, midweek departures, max 30-day stay. I asked for non-sale, 21-day advance purchase Friday departures because that is when I like to take off. These fares are for comparison purposes, and are not meant to be taken as the best possible. Call your travel agent or a consolidator and let them do the work for you, saving you money in the bargain. They have access to seat dimension information in their computerized reservation and data retrieval systems.
Legroom, the distance between the junction of the seat back and seat bottom and the back of the seat ahead, is not uniformly available from the airlines. What they do all offer is seat pitch, which is the distance between a given part of one seat and the same part on the next seat. This measurement is easy to take and hard to fudge. Some airlines gave me a range. Those airlines were assigned the shortest pitch in their range. Some airlines did not have seat pitch available in their systems. For those airlines, I used information from Airline Seat Comfort: In a Word, Dismal in the July 1997 issue of the excellent Consumer Reports Travel Letter. Those airlines are noted with an asterisk. The CU article measures other comfort factors such as seat width and cabin configurations to come up with cheap seat comfort scores.
I included information on Virgin Atlantic's Premium Economy and British Airways' Club World for comparison purposes. These seats are not available under any kind of discount other than those of their airline's frequent flyer plans. Perhaps an airline will try setting up a small section with a little more room at a price a little higher than economy. Virgin is on the right track, but their premium of $560 for 7 more inches makes me plan to fly through any number of gateways using United or BA 767s next time.
How much would an airline have to charge to recoup the lost revenue of removing a row of seats to make a section with a comfy 39" pitch? The 31" gained by removing one row of three seats would yield four rows with 38.75" pitch. British Airways, Virgin's main competitor, would have to raise the fare $231, from $923 to $1154, on their Dulles to London flight. I would gladly pay such a surcharge, as would plenty of parents with too much baby gear, not to mention frequent travelers who can't afford the $5248 for 50" pitch up in Club World. If the lost row was assigned a lower, more realistic fare, then the surcharge would be even lower.
A lot of 32" seats are now available that weren't last winter! United and British Air now offer 32" seating in their 767s, although both their 777s and BA's 747s are still in the 31" munchkin class. Delta and Swissair dropped out of the Washington-Europe non-stop market. The remaining Swissair flight to Zurich is really an Austrian Air flight stopping on the way to Vienna.
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Fare |
Seat pitch |
Duration |
Aircraft |
Airline |
Flight # |
Airport |
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Amsterdam |
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Amsterdam |
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Brussels |
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Frankfurt |
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Frankfurt |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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London |
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Milan |
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Paris |
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Paris |
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Reykjavik |
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Shannon |
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Vienna |
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Zurich |
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Zurich |
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