'Backless seats': The photo behind the outrage. Photo / Supplied, Twitter
'Backless seats': The photo behind the outrage. Photo / Supplied, Twitter
Budget air travellers in Europe love to bemoan the state of their spendthrift carriers, but one passenger thought that the penny-pinching had reached a new low when the row of seats he was assigned to appeared to be missing an important feature . . .
"#easyjet beats @Ryanair to have backless seats," tweeted Matthew Harris as he boarded his EasyJet flight from Luton to Geneva. "How can this be allowed?"
Accompanying the tweet was a photo of a woman perched on a seat clearly missing a back, and partially held together by gaffer tape. From the picture, the flight appeared to be full of passengers with those in backless seats resigned to flying in discomfort.
One spoof account chimed in saying "this is the money saving seat" and that seat backs were available at a cost - making fun of the budget airline's practice of elective charges.
However, what happened next would fan the flames of this PR disaster and send this budget plane meme viral.
A member of the Easyjet communications team was quick to respond to Matthew's tweet, writing:
"Hi Matthew, thanks for bringing this to our attention, before we can investigate this could I ask you to remove the photograph & then DM us."
If the picture of the backless seats was incendiary, it was this request to remove it that helped it spread further. One twitter pundit asked Easyjet if they had ever encounered the "Streisand effect"?
"Absolutely not," replied Matthew. "This is a real photo of a plane currently decending [sic] to Geneva"
Absolutely not. This is a real photo of a plane currently decending to Geneva pic.twitter.com/BULiB4H3jt
By this point the picture had been retweeted 15,000 times with almost 30,000 likes. A sprawling thread of thousands of responses helped spread the photo, with people outraged that passengers would be assigned such clearly unsafe seats.
But of course, the uncomfortable-looking passengers never flew in them.
Members of the aerospace community began to chime in, saying that the airline was perfectly in line to fly with "inoperative" seats as long as the damaged seats were logged and passengers relocated.
"The lady was moved to a spare seat once the flight was fully boarded," Matthew eventually admitted. "Not sure what would have happened if the flight was full." However, Easyjet was very clear on what would happen to the passengers.
The airline replied with a statement saying "safety is out highest priority and passengers would never have been allowed to fly in the seats as they were inoperative.
" If the flight had been full then two passengers would have been offered an alternate flight as they would not have been permitted to travel in these seats."
Yes, the plane was able to fly, and yes there were seats without backs on that flight. But, of course, no passengers were made to sit in them.
The airline would appear to be the victim of 'fake news' as CNN wrote, and assumptions too quickly leapt to by "a number of British news sites".
However a further twist reveals the seats had been missing for almost a week.
Luton to Berlin: Passengers claim the seats had been missing for days. Photo / Supplied, Thomas Day, Twitter
The plane G-EZBV, an Airbus A319-111 which formed the Luton to Geneva service, had also been missing the seats since at least Friday when it flew Luton to Berlin as service U22103.
One twitter user who claims to have been on the Berlin service, said passengers were unable to fly because of the missing seats: "the crew ended up paying people to get off the plane because it was fully booked."
Something's missing: The plane appears to have been without the seats for 22 repositionings. Photo / Supplied, flight radar
Accompanying the message was a picture of what appeared to be the same seats, four days earlier, still minus backs. Although, at this point the seats had printed notes taped to them, apologising and telling passengers not to sit in them.
No budget airline would be too cheap to make passengers fly in broken seats, but it seems they might be too miserly to repair the seats.
