The Unexpected Reason Some Airplane Seats Don't Line Up With The Window

If you book a window seat on an aircraft, you expect a view. We'd say it's a given. But on some aircraft, it's absolutely not. You can book a "window seat" and find yourself face-to-face with the plastic body of the airplane rather than a sweeping view from sea to sky. Or you'll have a partial view and have to crane your neck to see out of a window placed awkwardly between seats. How does this happen?

The blame doesn't lie with the aircraft manufacturers. Companies like Boeing design planes so that the seats align with the windows. So the fault isn't theirs. Instead, the buck stops with the airline. Airlines receive empty aircraft bodies, and they can configure the seats inside however they like. Many opt to put seats closer together than the manufacturer had planned for so they can squeeze more passengers onto the plane. Every time a seat moves forward by just an inch, the windows get slightly more misaligned until some poor passenger ends up in a windowless window seat. (Check out the worst offenders in our article about airlines with the worst legroom!)

Cramming more people into economy is one reason some airplane seats don't line up with the window, but there are others. Some airlines add more or fewer seats to business class than the manufacturers had planned for, which has a ripple effect on the classes further back. And with more and more airlines now adding a premium economy section to their planes, the issues with misaligned windows are likely to get worse.

Can you avoid booking a windowless seat? Maybe. One seat on European budget airline Ryanair became famous for having no window, even turning into a meme. Ryanair trolled passengers who booked the infamous seat 11A and expected a window, replying to a disgruntled customer on X (formerly known as Twitter), "We sell seats, not windows, Paula." To be fair to Ryanair, they state the seat has no window at the time of booking.

But not all airlines are as upfront (or sassy) as Ryanair. If you want to know whether your window seat has a window, check out AeroLOPA, which shows the seating plans of many aircraft across hundreds of airlines. If you want to see some really wacky seat placement, check out the layout of this British Airways Airbus A380-800, with a plane seating arrangement that passengers hate!