If you’re booked to fly with British Airways for your upcoming holiday, you might be set for a rather upright journey. An entire row of seats on the new British Airways A350 planes do not recline, it has been revealed.
In an internal memo, Amy James, BA’s head of cabin crew, reportedly told colleagues: “It has been confirmed to me that there are six seats in row 35 where there are no recline.”
One stewardess told Metro.co.uk: “It’s obviously happened because they wanted to cram in as many seats as possible. We’ve been told that it was due to revenue that they’re like that. No one realised it was a problem until we started doing short haul on them. People kept asking if they were broken.”
While the seats do not recline, they do offer slightly more leg room, James added, telling colleagues: “What I’m still investigating is what this means in terms of notification to customers and seating plans.”
Earlier this week reality star Gemma Collins sparked a debate on whether it’s actually socially acceptable to recline your seat on a flight in the first place.
Rupert Wesson, academy director of Debrett’s, the authority on etiquette training in the UK, told HuffPost UK: “The seats on most aircraft are designed to recline and so of course it is acceptable, but that does not mean that it should be done without care and consideration for the person sat behind.”
If a meal is about to be served there’s no point in reclining “because you will only have to put it back up again”, he said. And in his view, you don’t need to ask permission to recline – but it’s important to do it carefully and check that you are not going to knock over drinks, laptops and iPads when you do so.
“A quick glance to check will also indicate to the person behind that you going to recline which is always helpful,” he added.
BA is currently only using one A350 plane on short haul flights from London to Madrid, but the company is set to expand the service with 18 new planes this autumn, with flights to Dubai, Toronto and Tel Aviv, according to The Times.
A BA spokesperson told HuffPost UK the seats in question are in the World Traveller (Economy) cabin and have cabin walls behind them.
“Due to the layout of the cabin, a handful of World Traveller (economy) seats have limited recline. These seats offer more legroom to account for this,” they said.