Armrests have been a source of consternation for travellers since airlines replaced wicker armchairs with rows of seats in the 1930s.
The passive-aggressive battle for who gets to rest their arms in shared space has only escalated as budget airlines squeeze passengers’ comfort for the sake of their bottom line. Seat widths are now as little as 39cm (15 and a half inches).
A truce may soon be possible, however, after a team of British engineers invented a low-cost device that allows passengers on each side to share with minimum aggravation.
Charlie John, 23, an aeronautical engineer who recently graduated from Kingston University, said that his team came up with the idea for a wrist-wrest after unspoken territorial fights with strangers.
“You often find that the person in the middle gets to keep both sides. But in this scenario everyone gets two armrests.”
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The device, which is projected to cost about £5 each, is a rigid length of material fitted to the wrist-end of an armrest. Passengers can rotate it so that the armrest becomes a T-shape, with small platforms jutting out over each passenger’s knee.
It means passengers can rest their elbows at the rear portion of the armrest, one slightly forward of the other person’s, and rest their wrists on the top of the T.
John, who is a graduate engineer with Ryanair but is developing his Slip & Slide Armrest as a side project, said that flights were becoming increasingly hard to bear.
“I flew with Jet2 last year. It was awful. You couldn’t even call it an armrest. It was so uncomfortable for a four-hour flight.”
John tested the device on 100 people at the International Centre for Aerospace Training in Cardiff, which has a 737 fuselage normally used for training cabin crew. His team invited the testers to use the aircraft’s conventional armrests and then brought them back when their devices were fitted.
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“Eighty-three per cent of them said that they found it a lot more comfortable. We did have the odd person who said: ‘I only travel first class.’ ”
The inventors won £2,000 in prize money when they beat 160 rivals in their university’s Bright Ideas design competition.
They are now pitching for a further £15,000 grant from the university and up to £60,000 from other sources.
The team is hoping that a sponsor may come forward to offer the £17,000 needed to secure a patent for the device, which can be retrofitted to existing armrests in ten minutes.
The inventors went to the aircraft interiors company Safran in November for a meeting with a junior engineer, but soon found themselves joined by the company’s head of engineering.
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Liz Wyse, an etiquette adviser for Debrett’s, said that the invention could end a thorny problem that tested even the most polite traveller’s patience.
She described the armrest extender as “quite ingenious” as a way of relieving the sense of “being boxed in and trying to accommodate being at close quarters”.
She said: “You want to reach some kind of accommodation that is comfortable for everyone. If anybody was going to get both armrests, it ought to be the person in the middle because they’ve got the worst seat. They’re sandwiched and they have no room to manoeuvre. The people on the aisle or the window side both have the freedom to move away. So they should be the people who have the single armrest because they’re in more advantageous seats.
“I think everyone would agree that sitting in the middle is by far the worst seat. My heart always sinks when I see that I’ve been allocated the middle. The least you can do is spread your elbows because you haven’t got much of anything else.”
Debrett’s began offering advice on aeroplane conduct about 15 years ago with the rising popularity of budget travel.
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“Rich people still fly first-class and business-class and those dilemmas are much less inconvenient,” Wyse said. “But etiquette is for everyone.”
One rival solution, named Soarigami, aims to solve armrest disputes by slotting over the top and dividing the space with a barrier between.
Unlike John’s invention, it requires a passenger to negotiate with their neighbour about whether to put it into use.
Arthur Chang, who came up with an idea when he was at Cornell University, told The Wall Street Journal that his divider, which is shaped like a paper aeroplane, began as a joke.
“It’s a nice conversation piece,” Chang said. “If you bring a Soarigami along and you offer it to the other person to use, and they refuse, then you kind of won the armrest fair and square.�� Chang has since sold 15,000 of the devices.
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Wyse said that even if the inventions solved armrest disputes, there was still plenty of anxiety for passengers.
Debrett’s offers tips on where to put luggage, how gracefully to get off a plane and dealing with “the dreaded tray that comes down”.
