It's simple, but very efficient; alternating rows gives everyone enough elbow room, and taking careful notice of seat position reduces bottlenecks from aisle-seaters having to stand up all the time. Steffen's work was published this week in the science collection arXiv, and was demonstrated on the show This vs. That, which you can see below. Steffen did not get the response he was hoping for from the airlines when he first presented his work, but "Now that we have [real data]," he says, "I guess we'll see."