Ryanair, Spring Airlines consider letting passengers travel standing

Two airlines are toying with this idea: why not let passengers stand up on flights so that every flight can carry more of them than when they are seated? It is Ryanair, the low-cost carrier airline based in Dublin, Ireland, and Spring Airlines, another low-fare airline, headquartered in Shanghai, China, that have come up with the revolutionary suggestion in passenger aviation.

By taking away seats in order to accommodate standing passengers, the airlines hope to raise capacity on domestic flights up to 50 per cent, even though standing passengers will be paying lower fares than the sitting ones.

This would result in an overall rise in revenue per flight as well as facilitate the airlines to lessen costs by letting them operate less number of flights and employ less number of workers.

According to media reports, Michael O’Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair, has suggested that passengers who stand in flights could be “safely strapped to stools or railings.”

The maverick Michael O’Leary had, earlier in 2009,  declared that he would like to charge passengers to use the of restrooms of Ryanair flights and had even gone to the extent of mooting the idea of charging overweight passengers extra.

Michael O’Leary, according to reports, wants Boeing Company make planes having a special “standing room only” in which passengers can sit on stools instead of sitting in chairs. This way, O’Leary thinks, Ryanair can save up to 30% more passengers on its planes.

However, airline passengers in the United States are unlikely to be allowed to fly standing since the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency which regulates air travel in the country, stipulates that all air passengers above the age of 2 has to have a seat or a berth.

(According to aviation experts, the term ‘berth’ possibly dates back to the period of piston-engine planes that provided sleeping berths for cross-country flights.)

A spokesman of the US Federal Aviation Administration was quoted as saying that it is “stretching” to say that leaning against a rail or a stool would be a ‘berth’ and that the law clearly lays down that everybody above the age of 2 has to have a seat.

The Shanghai-based Spring Airlines, the 4-year-old airline that claims to be the first low-cost carrier in China, is going ahead with the ‘stand-up’ idea and seeking permission from China’s aviation regulators to reconfigure its planes to let some passengers stand up in flight.

And, the standing passengers will certainly enjoy the benefit of having to pay less than their sitting counterparts.

In fact, the stand-up idea, say reports, was suggested by none other than China’s Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang.