My Favorite Seat On A Plane

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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. It’s even more important if you’re going to be on a plane for 18 hours.

We can use miles to book flights when traveling over the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, but most of our flights are short trips within the continental U.S. Typically, we fly in economy with American, Delta, JetBlue, or Southwest, and it’s not worthwhile to use miles or cash to upgrade to first class.

However, there’s one seat on the plane I’ll always take if available. It’s on Southwest, and I’m occasionally lucky enough to snag this seat. I can get it more often now than before because we’ll pay for Upgraded Boarding to be amongst the first to get on the plane.

Due to the seat designs on certain airplanes, access to the emergency exits necessitates removing the seats 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 configuration designate this seat as “Premium” and charge extra to sit there. Since Southwest doesn’t charge for seat assignments (well, I think it’s fair to now say “not yet“), this seat is usually the FIRST one snapped up by savvy travelers, usually those who pay for Business Select fares. 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.

If you’re looking for this seat on Southwest, it’s seat 12A on the Boeing 737-700, seats 16A and 16F on the Boeing 737-800, and seats 16A and 16F on the Boeing 737 MAX 8.

Other airlines had a similar setup, and I had the legroom seat on a flight on American, of all carriers. They had a configuration on some of their A319s. (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).

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 believe there are still a few JetBlue planes flying with a missing seat in the exit row.

I’ll gladly take this seat whenever I can find it since it’s my favorite seat in economy. I’ll even give Sharon the window seat on the next flight. Hopefully, she won’t get a seat like this.

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