Where to sit flying in Covid times

Deciding where to sit on a plane has always been an exercise in strategy and skill: how to get themost legroom, the best shut-eye, the quickest exit. The stakes certainly feel higher now.

I asked Sandra Albrecht, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the chief epidemiologist behind Dear Pandemic, a scientific communication effort on social media, if she would cancel her flight if someone sat next to her.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “As with everything Covid-related, the risk spectrum is a sliding scale. You can think of seating as something you’d be able to slide up a notch and down a notch, but there are other things you could slide, like, 10 points up or 10 points down.”

Risk tolerance and health vary, of course, so let’s return to your question about window seats. If the goal is to sit as far from strangers as possible, your hunch is theoretically correct.

“If you’re in the window seat and the aisle seat wasn’t occupied, the nearest passenger would be in the middle section or on the other side of the plane,” said Arnold

Barnett, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management statistics professor who has studied the effects of keeping middle seats open on the likelihood of getting sick. “That’s already a distance of several feet.

If everyone’s wearing masks, that’s a good situation.” Even then, it’s not open-andshut. Say you have selected the perfect window seat and, boom, a shrieking baby sends an annoyed passenger scrambling for calmer pastures – next to your son. Or a seat doesn’t recline, causing its occupant to move. Or the plane is 70% full and the math works out that a handful of solo travellers have to sit together.

If you’re someone who can’t tolerate that kind of uncertainty, sit on the aisle in the centre section – the aisle will be on one side and an empty middle seat will be on
the other.

“The benefit is that you don’t have anyone sitting next to you, so you’re farther away from other people for a period of time,” Albrecht said. “But you do have a variety of people in the aisle, so you’ll probably have briefer interactions with a lot of different people.” Luckily, Barnett said, when someone does brush by (say, on their way to the bathroom), “it’s such a short time that you’re in close proximity and you’re wearing masks”. We can only predict and control so much, so experts recommend focusing on exactly that: what we can predict and control.

“We shouldn’t let the seatassignment question distract us from thinking through how we can stay safe throughout the rest of the travel process,” Albrecht said. That means leaving your mask on, eating at home or in the airport, and waiting until the rush has subsided to deplane.

It also means keeping some perspective: we’re in a pandemic that has ravaged air travel – on 1 November, the number of people passing through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints clocked in at around 38% of last year’s figure, according to the agency’s ongoing tally.

Even holiday travel is expected to be down; airports may be busy around Christmas, but the numbers are certain to be a fraction of what they normally are. And because your son is flying the week before – a particularly smart move any year, but especially now, when crowds bring safety concerns – he’s likely to end up with lots of elbow room. As I suspected, the seat map confirms: there is still a sea of open window seats.

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