Reason many travellers are avoiding seat 11A when booking a flight

It’s pretty much the worst seat in the house, or plane in this case

For those of you who’ve decided to fly away from the cold winter weather for a bit you might not put all that much thought into which seats you’ll get on the plane.

If you’re flying on a 737, the workhorse of the budget airline, and want a window seat then you might be tricked into thinking that seats A and F will be your best bet to get where you’re going.

However, there’s one seat on many flights, which is pretty much the worst one of all to be booked on and that’s the dreaded seat 11A.

If you're boarding a 737 then stay away from 11A. (Joan Valls/Urbanandsport /NurPhoto via Getty Images)

If you’re boarding a 737 then stay away from 11A. (Joan Valls/Urbanandsport /NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Should you end up booking this particular spot on the plane then prepare to be tormented as your window seat offers you the view of f**k all beyond the aircraft interior.

This is very much a breach of the social contract that comes with booking a seat on a plane, you get the aisle seat if you want to spill over into the extra space provided, the middle seat if you want to use both armrests and the window seat if you want to look out of the window.

However, the dreaded 11A gives you all of the downsides of the window seat, namely only one armrest that is rightfully yours and no aisle to stretch your legs in, but none of the benefits of being able to gaze out at the skyline as you soar above it.

Even more insulting is that the person on the other side of row 11 in seat F has got a fantastically placed window, which they can make the most of, so your best view from 11A might be to just look right down the row and out of that distant porthole.

Frankly, the unfortunate souls in 12A and 12F don’t seem to have a great view outside either, but it’s still not quite the blank wall that 11A would give you.

If you want some advance warning of the type of view you’d get from your window seat on the plane, then you can hop onto a site like AeroLOPA which has floorplans of pretty much every airline’s plane.

Here’s the problem, basically every other ‘window seat’ gets at least some view of the window, but not seat 11A. (AeroLOPA)

You’ll be able to see how much legroom you get and what sort of window view you might be in for.

Weirdly enough, if you sit on the right hand side of the plane, so that’s seats D, E or F, you can get slightly more legroom on a 737 because the design is slightly asymmetrical.

It’s not much, but as a certain supermarket is fond of saying, ‘every little helps’.

Meanwhile, there are some seats which give you glorious levels of leg room either because there’s nothing in front of them or due to them being located by the emergency exits.