United seat selection fart disclosure

I flew to New York yesterday, can you tell? When I got to the airport I thought I was going to be stuck in a middle seat for over 6 hours. Thankfully, I was able to shuffle some things around and get put on an aisle seat and then a window seat for the next flight. Still, I’m tall so it wasn’t the most delightful experience being crammed into a plane for that long.

The part that made it less delightful was the man in front of me on the first flight who A) immediately reclined his seat all the way back and B) was aggressively passing gas for the better part of 4 hours. I am not guessing it was him. I heard him. Multiple times.

This got me thinking… planes are adding more and more smart tech all the time. Now you can charge your phone or plug in headphones and view in-flight entertainment on flights, which is pretty cool. What if we took this a step further with smart seats? You could measure things like incidents of vomiting, and maybe even a vibration reader to detect how many times someone tooted on their seat.

The thinking here is you could upsell a deeper clean than normal for the germaphobes out there. Should every plane seat just be cleaned well by default? Yes. Are they? I don’t think so.

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