Jaunted

The problem is that Koito kind of fudged safety test data and made changes to designs without getting formal approval. There’s roughly about 150,000 of these unsafe seats flying around the globe. Some of our favorite issues with the seats include the possibility that they aren’t necessarily as flame retardant as they should be.

The European version of the FAA—the European Aviation Safety Agency—wants all these seats out of the planes within the next two years. However, the FAA is leaving it up to airlines to determine whether these seats are sufficient. Let’s just hope that the airlines can spend some of the checked baggage revenue to improve the seats. However, the likelihood of being an airline accident is pretty rare, so it’s got to be even more of a slim chance that we’d even be in one of these seats—but still...

[Photo of some slightly famous airplane seats: popculturegeek.com]