“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. We are currently 30,000 feet over Los Angeles. Fuel prices have risen 2.7% during this trip down from Seattle.  Please insert your credit card into the seatback in front of you in the next twenty seconds if you want to avoid being ejected before San Diego. Thanks.”

Relax, dear reader, it’s not real life (yet), just Paul Kedrosky   extrapolating the trend shown by Northwest’s announcement that they will charge extra for certain prime seats in coach — exit-row seats or aisle seats near the front of the cabin.  
As much as I hate the degradation of air travel (for someone having flown a lot in Europe and Asia, our domestic air travel is like taking a Greyhound bus), and being nickel-and-dimed, in this case I happen to agree with some of Paul’s commenters: if there are seats that passengers “fight for”, that means those seats represent premium value, why not use a market-mechanism to assign them, vs. random luck.   I still love the post, one has to appreciate Paul’s humor.

Tags: airlines, air travel, airline pricing, NorthWest, humor