Fliers keen for more elbow room and space to stretch their legs have won an important battle in the fight against shrinking airline seats.

A US court of appeal has ordered the body in charge of American carriers, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to rethink its response to a campaign group’s plea for a law on minimum seat width.

The FAA, responding to a petition dubbed the “Case of the Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat” filed by Flyers Rights [sic] in 2015, said that the changing seat sizes posed no danger to passengers in the event of an emergency and that the group's concerns were “related to passenger health and comfort and do not raise an immediate safety or security concern”. The safety concerns were the crux of the issue ruled on by judges at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Americans are getting bigger as seats get smaller, the group says Credit: Getty

The court, however, rejected the FAA’s arguments, telling the authority to reconsider its stance on seat width and pitch.

“As a matter of basic physics, at some point seat and passenger dimensions would become so squeezed as to impede the ability of passengers to extricate themselves from their seats and get over to an aisle. The question is not whether seat dimensions matter, but when,” the court said in its ruling.

Flyers Rights found that seat pitch - the distance between a seat and the one in front or behind - had decreased from 35 inches in the Seventies to 31 and in some cases, 28 inches, while average width was down from 18.5 inches in the early Noughties to 17 inches.

The not-for-profit campaign group also noted that “the average American flier has grown steadily larger in both height and girth”, expressing concern that “the decrease in seat size, coupled with the increase in passenger size, imperilled passengers’ health and safety by slowing emergency egress and by causing deep vein thrombosis”.

The FAA said, however, that their testing showed that seat dimensions had no impact on emergency exits, but Judge Patricia Millett said “that makes no sense”.

The judges ruled: “Economy-seating pitch could decrease to levels that could impede emergency egress.”

Though the court cannot order the FAA to regulate on seat width it did ask the administration to review its response to Flyers Rights.

Flyers Rights hailed the ruling as a “victory” and said it wants the FAA to appoint a representative advisory committee to recommend minimum seat standards and place a moratorium on further seat and leg room reductions until new regulations are adopted.

A spokesperson for the FAA told Reuters the agency “does consider seat pitch in testing and assessing the safe evacuation of commercial, passenger aircraft. We are studying the ruling carefully and any potential actions we may take to address the court’s findings."

In March this year Telegraph Travel reported on how a number of major airlines, including British Airways and Emirates, are adding extra rows in cabins and therefore reducing seat sizes.