24 April 2006
WienAir to take flight
Airline to offer middle-only seating
FRISCO, Tx. -- Airlines have always put a premium on elbow room for their passengers, but a new start-up airline will fly
 in the face of
that convention. Entering service to six Midwestern states this fall, WienAir will fly a fleet of
Boeing 737B aircraft with a configuration of middle-only seats.
Working closely with Boeing cabin-space engineers, WienAir was able to
configure its seats so that every passenger seat is adjacent to at least two other
passenger seats and in some cases adjacent to as many as five other
passenger seats.
Travel Fox was able to acquire an early concept drawing
(shown here) of the exterior fuselage characteristics but was unable to
get access to the seating layout.
In
a prepared statement, Carla Undershime, corporate communications director
for the airline, told a gathering of reporters here, "WienAir is taking
a different approach to air travel. Instead of offering our passengers
more room, we promise them more opportunity to meet their neighbors. Instead of
peace and quiet, we afford friendly conversation. Instead access to bluetooth, we give them the chance to meet others with
green
teeth. That's how we came up with our motto of 'WienAir: the neighborly airline.'"
The new airline's owner and CEO,
Peter Jamershime, who made a fortune in the reprocessed beef
industry, told Travel Fox, "I got the idea after shopping at our local IGA. I was unwrapping a package of wieners that I'd bought for a big
family barbeque we was having up to our summer place. I mean a big
barbeque.
We had well over 300 relatives jammed into our place, which ain't much
bigger than a country fry barn.
"Well, as I was unwrapping that there package, I seen that the wieners
in the middle was straight and pink on all sides while the ones on the
ends was bent and sort of discolored on a couple of sides. Then, as I
was watching all our kin folk standing around ass-to-elbow, I thought how it kinda made me feel better to be in the middle of the group
than on the edges. That's when it hit me like a hammer upside the head
of steer in a
slaughterhouse: an airline where nobody
had to sit alone. So that's just what I done."
Sheila Inskeep, a certified EST therapist and executive director of the
International Food Therapy Association, noted, "There may well some good
reasoning behind Mr. Jamershime's belief. Indeed, wieners in the middle
of the package may feel more secure and loved—thus the flush in their
skins and their erect statures—while the dogs at the ends are degraded in
appearance due to the pressures on them as buffers to their
environment."
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© 2006 Applied Psychology
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