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Jim Fox dreads flying.

With good reason. At 6-feet-10, the former NBA player has to squeeze himself into economy class seats, which isn’t always possible.

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On a recent flight from Phoenix to London, he wedged himself into the seat for takeoff and landing. “The rest of the time, I had to sit in the jump seat in the back of the plane,” he remembers. The jump seats, usually located in the forward and rear of the aircraft, are normally used by flight attendants and have ample legroom because there are no seats in front of them.

“The seats weren’t always this small,” remembers Fox, who began playing professional basketball in 1967, a full decade before airline deregulation.

He’s right. The average seat pitch, a rough measure of legroom, has shrunk from 35 inches when Fox started flying in the late 1960s to about 31 inches today. While some of the reductions are partially the result of new seat technologies that allow for thinner seats, the amount of personal room has also dwindled dramatically.