Scoring an Extra Seat on a Plane

I was delighted when we wound up with an extra seat on our flight to Long Beach. That meant the two of us had three seats, so Frank could sit on the aisle and I could sit at the window. We used the seat between us for elbow room and a place to put things. I even took advantage of the TV screen, leaving it on the status channel so I could glance over now and then to see what state we were flying over.

Now here's where it gets cool: the same thing happened on our return trip! We had reserved seats 21A and 21B and nobody came to sit in 21C (the aisle seat). Once the doors were closed, Frank moved into the aisle seat and I raised the armrest and enjoyed the luxury of elbow room. And since we were flying JetBlue, we had adequate leg room too! (They give you more space for your knees than United does, for instance.) Ahh! This is how coast-to-coast travel should always be!

Later we switched seats so that Frank could watch us descend over the beautiful Appalachian Mountains. We had missed the green landscape of the eastern states while we were in parched southern California.

It wasn't just luck that we got an extra seat. For one thing, we flew both ways on a non-peak travel day, a Tuesday. Also, we chose our seats from an online diagram. I made an effort to find seats that just might stay unsold if the flight was not crowded. In this case, the seats across the aisle were already sold, so only a single traveler would buy 21C. (If 21D had been unsold, two friends or co-workers might choose C and D and sit across the aisle from each other.) Our luck held and the flight was not even close to being sold out.