I love to fly in fancy airline seats. There’s nothing like flying in a lie-flat seat and getting to recline back and catch a few ZZZs at 35,000 feet.
While I can book those flights with miles when flying over the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, most of our other flights are usually short jumps around the continental U.S. Those flights are often in economy on carriers like JetBlue or Southwest and their planes don’t have fancy first-class cabins.
However, there’s one seat on the plane I’ll always take if available. I was lucky enough to snag this seat on a recent flight and since Sharon let me sit there, I owe her the window seats for both flights on our next trip (Note from Sharon: SCORE!).
Due to seat designs on certain airplanes, access to the emergency exits necessitates removing the seats located next to the door. This means the row directly behind the exit row has no seat in the row in front of it. Hello, legroom for days.
Most airlines that have this seat configuration will designate this seat as “Premium” and charge extra to sit there. Since Southwest doesn’t charge for seat assignments, this seat is usually the FIRST one to be snapped up by savvy travelers. However, on one of our flights, no one sat there before we got to it. Sharon immediately jumped into the row to save the seat for me (and that’s true love folks). Here’s what I was treated to on our Southwest A737-800 for the flight home.
SeatGuru even knows this the seat to get on this particular aircraft. Note that seats 16A and 16F are both green (indicating they are preferred seats to pick)
Now that I have the Southwest Premier credit card which reimburses the priority seating see, giving you a boarding position between A1 and A15, there’s a much higher chance I’ll be able to snag this seat again!
The previous time I sat in my favorite seat was on a flight on American, of all carriers. They had a configuration on some of their A319’s that had the same empty space for the exit row (Unfortunately, I now realize I was wearing the same sneakers) (Note from Sharon: They looked a whole lot newer then, my love. And yeah, I think you were wearing the same jeans, too).
Here’s the seat map from this version of the A319.
Alas, American Airlines decided this wasn’t an efficient way to cram people into an airplane and have since reconfigured their planes to fit more people (and removed these seats in the process).
I’ll gladly take this seat whenever I can find it, since it’s my favorite seat in economy. I’ll even give the window seat to Sharon on our next flight. Hopefully, she won’t get a seat like this.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
