Declining seat space for passengers on commercial airplanes, coupled with the growing prevalence of larger passengers in the U.S., has provoked concerns in recent years over the lack of regulations for seat dimensions and over whether there could be impacts on the speed of emergency evacuations.  

The Federal Aviation Administration has the authority to regulate seat dimensions for safety reasons, so as part of its response to these concerns, the agency commissioned a set of seat experiments and cabin evacuation time trials from its Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI). CAMI’s study looked in particular at the potential effects of seat width and pitch, and at the institute’s request, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine conducted an independent peer review of the study.  

Overall, the National Academies’ review finds that the CAMI study provides some potentially useful data but not the information that would be needed for the FAA to determine whether seat space regulations are warranted on safety grounds. This is largely due to a series of technical issues related to the study’s design, experimental setup, and analytic methods.  

The report offers a range of suggestions for obtaining useful insights from CAMI’s study, conducting additional trials and simulations, and proposing alternative research designs that can be used to provide the FAA with the necessary data.   DETAILS: Peer Review of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Study of the Effects of Passenger Seat Width and Pitch on Airplane Evacuation Performance is available for immediate release. Media inquiries should be directed to the Office of News and Public Information at tel. 202-334-2138 or email news@nas.edu.