More Devastating Proof of Why You Should Never Recline Your Plane Seat

From Popular Mechanics

• A viral post on Twitter shows someone's MacBook screen completely destroyed after the person in front of him on a Delta flight supposedly reclined their seat and broke it.

• Knee Defender, a product originally meant to keep people in front of you from reclining to preserve leg room, has taken on a new life as a laptop defender.

Let's say a prayer for the now-deceased MacBook Pro screen that was absolutely demolished on a Delta flight on Wednesday when its owner learned a tough lesson: Never, under any circumstances, tuck your laptop screen into the lip of your meal tray. Because the person in front of you is probably going to want to recline at some point, and if they do it at the right angle and the right speed, your screen is going to bust.

While the skeptics came out of the cracks to claim the MacBook owner, Pat Cassidy, had brought a busted laptop onto the flight to try to coax a free one out of Delta, other commenters posted photos of their own broken screens after similar nightmarish scenarios. Last October, another Twitter user, Jud Mackrill, posted a very familiar-looking photo of his own laptop/recliner debacle.

Mackrill noted that Apple Care, basically the company's version of a warranty, covered a laptop replacement. It's unclear if that's what others should expect, so Popular Mechanics reached out to Apple to find out. We'll update this story if and when we learn more.

In Cassidy's case, he wrote that Delta should "maybe have a little warning sign or someway [sic] to prevent my laptop from being destroyed when the person in front of me reclines their seat."

There may be some merit to that, but there's a bigger question: Whose responsibility is it to think of the laptops on board, the owner or the recliner? Is it common courtesy to look behind you before reclining, or is there some unspoken etiquette for slowly reclining your seat to avoid spilling the person behind you's orange juice? Or maybe the tall guy who needs some leg space is in the right, and if your laptop is jammed at the wrong angle, it's your fault.

As some Twitter replies suggested, it's not the most clever idea to pin the top edge of your laptop screen to the back of the meal tray, even if it is a perfect fit. And it does appear that Cassidy's laptop was pinned that same way. To throw a wrench into things, though, a Reddit user posted about nearly the same issue three months ago. They hadn't intentionally tucked their laptop into that cranny, but it had lodged itself there when the person in front reclined their seat. Feeling resistance now, they pushed back on the chair even harder.

Yip-Wah Chung, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University (and also a pilot!) tells Popular Mechanics that he's almost had his own laptop destroyed in much the same way over the years.

"Depending on the type of laptop and the angle at which the seatback hits the top edge of the laptop, I can conceive of the situation when a fast recline can either damage the hinge or crack the screen," Chung says. "I personally had a couple of close calls over the years. These days, I always place the laptop on my lap, just in case. Is that where we should place our laptops anyway?"

Whether or not you agree that laptops belong on laps and not meal trays, this technological debacle has happened enough times that there's an entire product devoted to it—the Knee Defender. It was originally meant to preserve the 30 to 34-ish inches of legroom per economy seat, as its name suggests, but it's taken on a whole new life in the digital era.

As the story goes, back in 1998, a 6′3″ guy named Ira Goldman was on a flight from Minneapolis to the Netherlands, when the person in front of him squashed his legs by reclining. He was ticked off enough to stick an umbrella across his foldout meal tray to keep from any more reclining going on. Five years later, Goldman started selling an official version of his McGuyvered leg-saver.

Sure, he got death threats. But that's probably par for the course, considering the vitriol the internet saw in the eyes of a man who was caught on video earlier this month, punching the back of a woman's reclined seat on an American Airlines flight.

But the Knee Defender haters backed off on Goldman and began buying the product once they realized it could save not only their knees, but their laptops, too. According to a 2014 story in Wired, Goldman was already receiving emails at the time from people who initially thought his invention was rude, but changed their minds after "their laptop screen [had been] cracked by a thoughtless recliner."

In the product description for Knee Defender, Goldman points the finger for the whole recliner-laptop fiasco on the airlines themselves: "If airlines will not protect people from being battered, crunched, and immobilized … then people need options to protect themselves."

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