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One thing I have always wondered when taking intercontinental flights is the way passengers are distributed in an aircraft. It seems to me that in some way people of different ethnicities are purposely mixed. I have the strange idea that this is preset and done mostly for security reasons.

Seeking for clarification on this matter. Please do not get me wrong as I am not trying to classify different types of people!

Fabrizio Mazzoni
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    I fail to see what ethnicity has to do with security and I believe that this question may attract the kind of responses we don't need in an international community. I am therefore voting to close. Sorry. – Simon May 31 '16 at 07:46
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    That would be illegal --and a huge commercial mistake-- to use ethnicity (or religion, or political choices) data for any distribution purpose in any European Union country, so maybe you are asking about another region. – mins May 31 '16 at 08:15
  • If it has to be closed please do so. My intention is not to create a flame post. – Fabrizio Mazzoni May 31 '16 at 08:30
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    The question itself is not a problem to me, this is more about the specific link with aviation. It would be a better fit for Travel.SE. – mins May 31 '16 at 08:32

1 Answers1

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People tend to travel by themselves or in small groups. They sit all over the airplane, either selecting their own seats or having them assigned by the airline's ticketing system. When you go to select your seats, the system shows you what seats are available, but it does not show you other passenger's ethnicities. Airlines also don't necessarily know passengers' ethnicities when assigning seats in advance, except to the extent that they could conceivably guess based on names (they may know what country's passport someone is traveling on, which is not the same as their ethnicity, but even so, they may not know this information until well after a seat assignment is in place).

So lots of people check-in and have their seats assigned basically randomly. The expected result is that small groups of people of different ethnicities would be mixed throughout the plane fairly randomly. I'm not understanding why you think this is something an airline would deliberately need to do, as it would already happen naturally.

Using ethnicity for seating purposes could also violate anti-discrimination laws in many countries, if this was something an airline even wanted to do.

It is sometimes the case that a large group of passengers largely of the same ethnicity will book a block of seats together as part of a group booking, such as a Japanese school trip or German musicians. Such groups may, if space permits, be seated together, and if the group is relatively ethnically homogeneous, you may find a number of travelers of one ethnicity seated together for this reason.

Zach Lipton
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  • Hi. The question was based purely on security. You know with things that happens these days you might want to split up people in order to avoid surprises. Good answer though. – Fabrizio Mazzoni May 31 '16 at 05:28
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    Given the way seats are typically assigned, how could an airline split large numbers of people up if they even wanted to? Passengers usually have their seats assigned in advance and those assignments generally don't change unless there's some special reason (change of aircraft most often). – Zach Lipton May 31 '16 at 05:34
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    As a sidenote, since you seem to think it's a security matter, the 9/11 hijackers were split up, at least within the first class/business class part of the aircraft. These seating charts come from a 9/11 conspiracy website, but appear to be accurate: UA 175, AA 11, UA 93. And there are plenty of innocent reasons why, say, five men of any ethnicity might travel together and wish to sit together. – Zach Lipton May 31 '16 at 05:40
  • @FabrizioMazzoni You seem to forget, or ignore, that in the majority of countries, more people are killed by those of their own ethnicity than by others. Logically, you would want to split up everyone - but that would be impossible. – Simon May 31 '16 at 07:48
  • @Simon Are you implying that homicides regularly happen on planes, and that splitting up people by seating them randomly would be a good solution to this? – Cody P Jun 01 '16 at 18:17
  • I sincerely doubt Simon was implying anything of the sort. – Zach Lipton Jun 01 '16 at 18:30
  • @CodyP Nope. Just that logic says that you cannot use ethnicity to determine security policy or the probability of being killed. Travel.SE or Sceptics.SE would be a good place to ask why. – Simon Jun 02 '16 at 06:39