These awful new airline seats are the horrifying future of travel

Flying’s great, don’t you think? Seeing the world, travelling to places that 100 years ago would have been impossible.

However, what’s also great is being able to sit down for the duration of your flight and not have the blood flow to your legs cut off. That’s a real perk.

One company, though, has been trying to put this to the test for several years, introducing new seats that look like they’ll make a journey for someone with average-sized legs unspeakably uncomfortable.

Italian company AvioInteriors came up with its ‘SkyRider’ seats several years ago, and it looks like they’ve confused ‘Cattle-Class’ for ‘Perching as if you’re meant to be riding a mechanical bull’.

Here’s what the ‘seats’ looked like when they were exhibited at the 2010 Aircraft Interiors Expo in the United States.

And here’s a demonstration from 2016, where you can see how ‘sitting down’ involves straddling the seat and, well, not being able to move all that much.

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According to Stuck at the Airport, the ‘SkyRider 2.0’ – that’s the updated and modernised version – was exhibited in Hamburg and is aimed at “[making] travel possible for people who would never otherwise be able to fly.”

The seats offer 23 inches of legroom – by way of comparison, most economy flights offer between 28 and 30 inches.

It should be noted that the SkyRider seats have yet to be certified for airlines, though AvioInteriors remains hopeful the newer model – thought to have more padding than the original – will be certified and taken up specifically for short-haul flights.

This is presumably allowing airlines to fit more passengers on each flight and bringing the cost down; they’re making no bones about the fact that the intention is to allow more people to fly, not to allow more people to fly in style.

How much would the price need to come down for you to consider flying in one of these seats? Or is there no number which would be low enough?

(Images: Unsplash/Getty)