Theme parks making seat accommodations
BY CARA BUCKLEY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - Wayne Kavanaugh is large, but the seats looming ahead made him feel strangely small. They sat side by side at the roller coaster's entrance, perfect replicas of the ones on the ride, their message achingly clear: Abandon all hope of riding, ye whose rear ends do not fit here.
"Test these seats before riding," instructed the notice above the seats, stationed steps from the noisy green loop-the-loop Incredible Hulk coaster, one of the biggest draws at Orlando's Islands of Adventure theme park.
With his brother and two young nephews watching closely, Kavanaugh took a breath and lumbered toward the seats, pivoted and eased himself into a squat. Resistance was immediate: His backside wouldn't budge past the armrests, let alone reach the sculpted seat below.
Kavanaugh tried wedging himself into the second seat. Foiled again.
"It's not going to work for me,"" he said as the roller coaster roared tantalizingly above. "You guys go ahead."
Kavanaugh, a 36-year-old inventory control specialist from New Jersey, last rode an upside-down roller coaster when he weighed 100 pounds less. "I want to say the seats are too small," he sighed. "But really, I'm too big. I was worried this would happen before I came down here."
"Test seats" front four rides at Islands of Adventure and its sibling, Universal Studios, appearing alongside the old-fashioned determiner of roller coaster ridership: the trusty yardstick. SeaWorld has a test seat in front of its Kraken roller coaster. Walt Disney World has two.
Park spokesmen from Universal and SeaWorld say the seats are there for guests' safety and comfort. Disney insists it installed them so people in wheelchairs can practice getting in.
But Kavanaugh and other hefty would-be riders know the seats are also there for them: with 64 percent of American adults overweight, the American derriere grows.
"I think it's a good idea so you don't have to go all the way up to the front and find you can't fit in," opined Traci Szala, 20, of Amsterdam, N.Y., after successfully shoehorning herself into a seat. "But I think all the parks should make the seats even bigger."
Not likely, says Bolliger & Mabillard, the Swiss roller coaster makers of the Hulk ride. Their coaster was made to accommodate the most, if not the widest, riders, namely those who fit its 18-inch seat.
"If we make larger seats, we'll have a problem," said Kim Jent, a roller coaster engineer. "Small people will find them too loose."
But a host of seat makers are accommodating America's great rearward expansion.
At movie theaters, the standard 18-inch-wide seats are being replaced by ones measuring 20 inches or more. Cinema love seats are making a comeback, but not only with lovebirds in mind: Their 40-inch expanse accommodates the amplest of behinds.
New York subway chiefs stopped ordering trains with 17.5-inch-wide bucket seats after customers complained and passengers began spreading themselves across two seats with a cheek in each. Seats in Miami's AmericanAirlines Arena and Pro Player Stadium range from 19 to 21 inches. Houses of worship are being forced to reconfigure: Churches that eschewed pews are finding fewer patrons can fit into seats with armrests.
"We've designed a pew-seat bucket combo where there's no armrest so you can put any size person in there," said a spokeswoman from Preferred Seating in Indianapolis. "The fellow that designs and makes the chairs is 300 pounds."
The biggest battle between blossoming bottoms and the seats that pinch them happens in the sky.
The Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, does not mandate a minimum seat size. Despite increasing passenger complaints, the standard economy class airline seats rarely measure beyond 17 or 18 inches wide. Southwest, Continental and Northwest airlines insist that overweight passengers pay for two seats. American Airlines recently trumpeted having "more room throughout coach," but this translated to more legroom, not wider seats. Roomier seats remain confined to first class, still the domain of bona fide fat cats.
"Everyone knows the airline seat problem is just getting worse," said Kathleen Robinette, director of a recent nationwide project that measured the dimensions of 4,431 people.
"But if they make the seats wider, that means less seats and less passengers. People would rather be squished in than pay more."
Meanwhile, at Islands of Adventure, the test seats' purpose was not clear to everyone. Kids played in some of them; parents posed their tots in others. Not everyone read the carefully worded small print below the "Test these seats before riding" sign:
"Persons with certain upper body dimensions may not be able to use the standard seat," it read. "Please use this test seat (with restraint buckled) to ensure your ability to safely ride."
No mention of those with certain lower body dimensions or of the fact that the one-size sculpted seats do not fit all.
Mary Staley, a 35-year-old mother of two from Omaha, Neb., said she appreciated the sign's tact as well as the seat, despite making a quick, failed stab at fitting into one outside Doctor Doom's Fearfall.
The seat sat prominently by itself, to the left of the ride's entrance, at the end of a courtyard, as high as a throne.
Staley gazed at the ride as it ascended hundreds of feet in the air, its passengers screaming.
"At least it gives me an excuse not to go on," she said.
