Special Needs

There are plenty of ways to lose weight, but I don't know of any to lose height.

Airline travel with my beloved M has presented an interesting challenge. My 5'2" frame squishes reasonably well into aircraft seats, but M is 6'4" and has bad knees. He has flown short-haul before, and finds that an hour on a plane results in a day of limping, so understandably he was quite worried about the 20-hour trip to Europe.

I've never had to deal with this before, but I figured there were plenty of tall people in the world, so someone had to have come up with a solution. I googled "Flying for tall people" and got a lot of complaining, but no real solution beyond flying business class (which I could afford -- if I wanted to spend my entire trip budget on flights). Qantas's Premium Economy would be affordable if we were going to London, but they don't have it on lesser routes like Singapore-Frankfurt.

All the talk of seat pitch did remind me of a website, Seat Guru, the ultimate flying resource for travel obsessives. Whilst specifically intended to provide the traveller with all the information they need to choose the best seat for their requirements, it also has some nifty features like a comparison charts for all airlines by class and haulage.

As it turns out, of the airlines which fly Australia to Germany, Emirates Economy has a few extra inches of seat pitch over most. They also cost a bit more, but hopefully it will be enough at least to make M semi-comfortable and not hobble for the entirety of the trip. On the plus side, they also have 10kg more baggage allowance than any other airline. Shopping!