As a tall person, I miss the 747s if for nothing else the stairway area where you could stand and even walk around. They sure made sure to get rid of that nicety.
As a slightly above average height 6’1”, I’m finding it harder and harder to fit in most planes lately. Are they putting the seats closer together or something?
"Seat pitch" is the term you're looking for, and the airlines have been steadily reducing the seat pitch over the last ~decade to squeeze in an extra few rows.
Some airlines are notably worse than others. Spirit and Frontier, in particular.
Yes, they are. Spirit, in particular, has reduce the amount of room to such an extent that anyone over 6' doesn't really fit without their knees pressing into the hard plastic seat in front of them. Look at leg room before booking a flight. It varies quite a bit from airline to airline.
I mostly fly spirit because it actually is much cheaper. Perfect for people under 6 foot who bring nothing but a backpack and don't mind the middle seat.
Yes. I started globetrotting seriously in 2006 and can attest to this phenomenon. I am 6'3". I need to pay for exit row or similar seats for short haul and play with points to get on business for transoceanic flights.
AFAIU, only a handful of major airlines are (partial) exceptions to the unrelenting trend of packing in more seats, decreasing both seat width and especially seat pitch. None of those airlines are in the U.S. I believe at least one is a Japanese carrier.
Occasionally you hear about cabin layouts that provide more width and/or pitch, but these never come close to recovering the space that has been lost over the past 20 years. Airlines don't announce space reductions, after all. For them it's always quietly 3 steps ahead (less space), loudly 1 step back ("roomier" seats).
Recently I read that Airbus was developing a revision to the A350 that would permit adding an entire additional row. Airbus had to do this because not only does the 777X support 10-abreast layout, but most customers have long moved to 10-abreast layout in the older 777 despite the 777 never being designed for 10-abreast. In fact, IIRC 1 or 2 major A350 operators had already moved to 10-abreast on the existing models, but they may be pushing the regulatory envelope, thus the need for Airbus to cooperate with some redesign work.
I've generally preferred Airbus planes. For reasons I never really understood (perhaps by mere coincidence of their design process, coincidences in evolutions in cabin construction material, or maybe deliberate design by Airbus), economy coach layouts typically provided anywhere from 1/2 to 2+ more inches of seat width relative to the comparable Boeing plane and cabin. A Boeing 737 or 737MAX with even the newest cabin construction technology is always going to be a tighter squeeze (at least width-wise) than an Airbus A320, for example.
Coach layouts for the A350 are likely going to shift from being some of the best to some of the worst in long-haul travel as the additional row comes half from accommodating thinner walls, and half from seats with less width. Same thing happened with the 777: when it first entered service it was one of the roomiest; now with 10 rows, and especially when invariably combined with reduced seat pitch (which I personally don't care quite as much about as others) it's soul crushing--metaphorically, figuratively, literally, actually, physically, all of the above.
For some reason Boeing made the 777/787 slightly too wide for 9/8 abreast so of course eventually the airlines realized they could snug in another column of seats. The airbuses generally don’t have that problem because they are already quite snug in default configuration. So ironically a product less comfortable by design ended up being more comfortable.
10 abreast in a350 sounds terrible though. Might work for shorter ultra cheap charters but I very much doubt that any mainline carrier would consider it. Think they did a similar concept with 11-abreast a380 but luckily no-one caught on.
I don't know how the Mint cabins fare, but IIRC Jetblue was an LCC that marketed very heavily that they removed seats to increase pitch.
(That was more of a side reason. The real reason is that the FAA requires an additional flight attendant for every 50 seats, so Jetblue just removed enough seats to get to a round multiple of 50 and decrease the amount of labor required.)
