OUTLIER, OUTFLYER

It was shortly after World War II that the British Overseas Airways Commission gave the go ahead for the prototype testing of the de Havilland Comet, believed to be among the first models designed for commercial travel. The Comet, designed a committee headed by Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, was put into scheduled service in 1952, and was regularly used by various airline service providers across the world until 1997. It was indeed a glorious model, and a visionary start to the art of aircraft design.

There was however, one small issue, which went unnoticed for a long time: Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, for all his grand visions, was himself a small man of 5’6”, and so, the planes he designed were designed bearing in mind humans of his dimensions. His company carried forward his legacy of building planes that were based on his earlier designs, and when the de Havilland Company was no longer at the forefront of aircraft design, its successors simply took its plans and tinkered around thereafter.

The result: modern day aircraft cabin are designed only to accommodate humans touching 5’6”, whether it be the default distance between two aligned seats, or the default distance between the floor and the overhead baggage storage units. A 5’8” being can squeeze about and manage, but anything taller than that is a marginalized outlier that the airline community really couldn’t care much about.

So whenever it so happens that I have to travel by air, a sense of cold engulfs me. At 6’3”, I get looks of disapproval from the lady at the check in counter as she labels me ‘Oversized’, and secretly wishes she could charge me extra. There is a genuine restriction in the seats I can occupy, for if I’m in the one by the window, I cannot compensate for the lack of space in front by stretching my legs out towards the side, and if I’m in the one near the aisle, my legs tend to obstruct traffic. I get equally dirty looks from the cabin crew that say “Every passenger around him is going to curse him, and I’m going to have to deal with it”.

And that is precisely what happens. Everyone does tend to curse me. The person sitting in front of me can’t recline, because my knees are jammed into the back of his seat, the person sitting beside me near the window cannot get out without having me get up and out into the aisle, and whenever that has to happen, the person sitting beside me toward the aisle has to get up too. When my knees begin to hurt, I have to shift around in my seat, and the rest of me is usually at odd angles after that happens, bringing my face uncomfortably close to the faces of one of those beside me (usually the one at the window, I get to see the view).

And don’t even get me started about what happens when there’s turbulence. That is a nightmare. For the poor bugger next to me.

If I’m lucky, I get a seat near the emergency exit, with a polite woman beside me who has a son as tall as me who also has to put up with similar discomfort and so she can completely understand the position I’m in and is willing to shift her legs to the left to give me some more leg space. If I’m unlucky, I get a window seat, with this gruff corporate man who is already in a foul mood because his company didn’t give him a business class ticket and is now placed beside a lamp post who will make clicking sounds with his tongue every time I have to move and wishes he could kill me with his stare when I ask him to get up so I can go to the loo.

But my troubles are not limited to sitting. While I’m standing waiting for a place in the queue in the aisle to exit the plane, the overhead bin is an obstruction, and I find myself bent so far that my head is either hovering precariously above the heads of those in the aisle already, or it dangling dangerously close to the person standing waiting in the seat in front of me. Either ways, not the best place for a head to be in.

So when I finally get off the craft, there is a sigh of relief on my part, and a greater one from my co-passengers. Apparently, tolerating me is a greater ordeal for them, than tolerating the craft’s dimensions is for me.

It is usually in the taxi ride from the airport home, when I’m nursing aching joints and a battered ego that I begin to wonder how much it would really take an airline to increase the distance between two seats. An inch here, a couple there, and life is so much simpler. And then usually my thoughts go on to higher planes, and more abstract notions, of how over-standardization never did anyone any good, of how people who don’t fit aren’t really allowed to say anything and what a helpless state that is, and of how best I should fire Sir Geoffrey de Havilland if I ever met him.

I finally get home, I’m greeted by my family, and in case there happen to be visitors who haven’t seen me in a long time, there are the usual expected comments about how tall I’ve gotten and how they have to crane their necks to see me and how that is uncomfortable for them. Really, someone’s got to start putting themselves in the shoes of the outliers and look inwards, and take a good look at how easy life is for them. Really.