Looking over my original post, perhaps my phrasing wasn’t clear. Yes, this is one way to decrease costs, but it comes at the expense of comfort. Airline companies are no stranger to this process, and have been rolling out new methods of packing as many passengers onto a plane as physically possible since the very first commercial airplanes took flight.

Awkward and regressive ideas like this, where the airlines are contemplating stacking people in uncomfortable looking double-decker seating to save precious inches of space are only coming out now because no significant strides have been made in making air travel less expensive to operate as a whole. It is always going to be easier to shave off a few inches of legroom and pack in another row of seating in the next generation of jet airliner than it is to invent a new type of jet fuel that is cheaper and burns cleaner without sacrificing performance, or developing a new more efficient fuselage that can fly just as far as a conventional plane while carrying less fuel, etc.

It would be nice to see air travel improve for a change, rather than continue to get worse and worse over time out of necessity.