Cramped conditions questioned on recent WestJet flight (www.ctvnews.ca)

submitted 3 days ago by SamuelRJankis@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[-] SamuelRJankis@sh.itjust.works 37 points 3 days ago

Since one of the top post here this week is from Fox News I wanted to take the opportunity to let people know how bad news is even from real news organizations and they should probably avoid interacting with places like Fox altogether.

This is a pretty widely reported about Westjet cutting the legroom. Almost all these articles has little useful information and largely just convey a sentiment that people should be angry at Westjet.

To provide examples of useful information this information took me about 25 minutes to gather:

These sites show how small the seat are even on a global level.

Has most of the airline - https://www.airlinequality.com/info/seat-pitch-guide/

Has less airlines but different plane model - https://www.netflights.com/useful-tips/legroom-chart

The Toronto Star article shows that more than half the seats is the smallest size.
Pitch is a industry term that doesn't clearly represent actual leg room.
Westjet does not present this information clearly when booking to allow the customer to make a informed decision.

This for an airline cater to taller people, proportionally longer femurs and probably larger back sides. The global adult femur length is around 18 to 20 inches accounting for the factors above these seat barely fit most adults in Canada.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/cramped-conditions-questioned-on-recent-westjet-flight/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/westjet-seat-overhaul-pause-9.7014320

https://globalnews.ca/news/11601466/westjet-shorter-legroom-flights-costs/

This Toronto Star one actually has some useful information:

https://archive.is/20260107185039/https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/28-inches-is-torture-viral-video-captures-lack-of-legroom-in-some-westjet-flights-what/article_4d3ec532-d038-4a8b-8a21-1129137cee42.html

[-] eightys3v3n@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Thank you.

I wish there was one article that had all this info instead of basically nothing like the CTV article -_-

I would probably pay for a news site that provided simple and verifiable information and links elsewhere like that rather than wordy writeups and crappy summaries or stolen videos.

[-] SamuelRJankis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

I think that is the crux of it aside from readers having little expectations of being informed for these reportings, it also seems that the news outlets no longer have viable revenue models that allow them to staff to the level it would take to write proper articles which is why the Toronto Star was the best out of them.

Will point out that CBC does take a lot of revenue from us collectively and this low effort type of reporting is become very common for them. That's addition to clearly trying to pander certain crowds with titles like this

Greenland has become the island that could break NATO

I'll still defend them as being the best large scale news outlet in Canada but they're becoming a astonishing poor place to be informed about events.

[-] definitemaybe@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

The CBC does a remarkably good job considering how their budgets have been repeatedly cut, relative to inflation, at the same time that their ad revenue has been in stay decline (same as everyone else).

And yet the CPC wants them axed, because the Republicans have shown them that conservative-owned media is one of the main ways to shift the Overton window further right, and public broadcasting/reporting is a major obstacle to them. Unbiased, accurate reporting doesn't align with their goals.