There is a little-known reason why you should always avoid being booked into seat 11A when you’re booking a flight.
If you’re unlucky enough to get that spot, you’ll find that you’re stuck in the middle of the plane with not even a view.
That’s because this seat isn’t next to a normal window, instead there is just a tiny circular window that you can barely see out of.
But why?
According to an expert from Flight Radar 24, “Ryanair’s seat 11A is windowless thanks to the Boeing 737’s cabin air conditioning system.
“The air conditioning on modern commercial jets is provided by two ‘packs’ that regulate the airflow and temperature in the cabin… Air travels from these packs to the passenger cabin via a series of ducts built into the sidewall of the aircraft.
Here’s the problem, basically every other ‘window seat’ gets at least some view of the window, but not seat 11A (AeroLOPA)
“One of these ducts is located alongside seat 11A in the Ryanair 737-800 cabin.”
What’s even more insulting is that the person on the other side of row 11 in seat F has got a fantastically placed window, which they can make the most of, so your best view from 11A might be to just look right down the row and out of that distant porthole.
Frankly speaking, the unfortunate souls in 12A and 12F don’t seem to have a great view outside either, yet it’s still not quite the blank wall that 11A would give you.
If you want some advance warning of the type of view you’d get from your window seat on the plane, hop onto a site like AeroLOPA which has floorplans of pretty much every airline’s plane.
You can see how much legroom you get and what sort of window view you might be in for.
Weirdly enough, if you sit on the right hand side of the plane – so that is seats D, E or F – you can get slightly more legroom on a 737 because the design is slightly asymmetrical.