Southwest to squeeze more seats into planes

Too bad - flying Southwest has been a relatively comfortable experience up to now. But the WSJ's Scott McCartney says that the airline wants to add capacity on its Boeing 737s. The change means an extra six seats on each plane.

Southwest is redoing the interiors of its jets, replacing the seat cushions with thinner foam materials while keeping most of the same frames and swapping out bulky seat-back pockets for mesh. The thinner cushions are actually more comfortable, Southwest says, and even though the airline is adding one more row of seats to its Boeing 737s, passengers will get the same usable space. Seat pitch - the space allotted to each row, including the seat and legroom -- will drop to 31 inches from 32 inches.

In the 40s and 50s, seat pitch was in the 33-34-inch range. Southwest did say that it's reducing the amount of recline to just two inches instead of three. That should provide a bit extra space.