Are you a ‘recliner’ or a ‘refrainer’? Do you ease your seat back on an aeroplane as soon as you can, or remain bolt upright and swallow your fury as the headrest in front is lowered a few inches from your nose? Or are you to be found in the slender oval on the Venn diagram; the waiting room between recliner and refrainer, hanging on until the food service has finished before caressing the recline button? Whose armrest is it? Nobody cares anymore. All anyone wants to know is will the person in front of them recline their seat?
According to a survey published this year by travel website The Vacationer, more than 77 per cent of respondents think it rude to recline your seat fully, thereby transforming a seemingly innocuous act into one charged with social tension. Sprinkle in a heady dose of ‘airport disorientation’, and all bets are off. Steve Taylor, Psychology Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, highlights the liminality of airports, calling them ‘zones of absence’. In other words: on an aeroplane, anything goes. What might cause you to blush on terra firma is barely an afterthought in the sky. There’s a reason they have a club a mile up there.
The internet is chock-full of footage and reports of in-flight bust-ups about reclined seats. In 2024, Cathay Pacific banned a Hong Kong couple from its flights following the Hongkongers’ hostility towards a Chinese woman in front of them who reclined her seat. In protest, the woman from Hong Kong reportedly stretched her legs out along the armrests of the reclining woman while her husband shook and pummelled the headrest. Uneasy relations between Hong Kong and China undoubtedly fed into the fracas but I did wonder momentarily whether stretching one’s legs out on armrests wouldn’t solve everything. It strikes me as a fair exchange: you recline, I stretch out, and together we form a sort of human jigsaw that wouldn’t look out of place in an El Salvador Mega Prison.
As a nervous flyer, I have always been an accidental refrainer. I envy the soul that can relax and recline but I am forever monitoring the movements of the air stewardesses and analysing the overhead lights and in-flight sounds; my husband will no longer sit next to me on flights and I have come to accept that I will die alone – and upright. I have made my peace with this but also recognise that I am not a true Refrainer. A Refrainer is one who could easily paint obtuse angles with his headrest and yet chooses not to.
As a nervous flyer, I have always been an accidental refrainer. I envy the soul that can relax
A rare breed one might think? Well, not according to the same Vacationer survey on the rudeness of a reclined seat. Apparently, almost 46 per cent of those surveyed said they don’t recline their seat because they think it rude to do so. Really? I was staggered by this statistic, seeing virtually no evidence of refraining on recent short-haul flights where at least three-quarters of seats were reclined. I suspect one might start out prepared to take a stand (or seat) on reclining and then relent once the seat in front has been reclined and the back ache begins.
As the pitch (technical term for the space between rows) decreases with every newly-designed aircraft, Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker points to the cynicism – and barefaced greed – of the airlines: ‘in economic terms, the airlines have sold the same inches of space twice – once to you, and once to the person behind you. It’s hard to get out of that bind.’
But get out of it you can. In 1998, Ira Goldman, all six foot three inches of him, invented the ‘Knee Defender ™’. This ingenious device – two small plastic clips on which is printed in tiny script the rejoinder ‘Be courteous, do not hog space!’ – works by clipping on to the seat tray mechanism of the seat in front thereby (don’t ask me how) jamming its recline function. The device is so controversial that it has its own Wiki page and has been banned by most major airlines following an incident in 2014 when its deployment on a United Airlines flight resulted in a fight between passengers who were subsequently ‘deplaned’ off route. Goldman recorded a boom in sales of the Knee Defender ™ after the United Airlines affair.
Interestingly, easyJet and Ryanair seats are not reclinable and as ‘fixed reclines’ are increasingly built into new fleets of aircraft, a major social division might cease to exist. While I will miss the opportunity to judge people on the tilt of their seats, I will be most sore if I never witness a Knee Defender ™ being fitted surreptitiously and the subsequent fireworks (or perfect, gloveless, deception). I’m also still looking for a True Refrainer; the kind of person who endures the infraction of a seat being lowered into his face without blinking, without feeling the need to engage in the ‘chain reaction of seat reclination’ – a sort of Übermensch of aeroplane passengers. Find me that person and I’ll sit next to him on our last, doomed, flight together.
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