Air travel is still way down compared to this time last year. But it is picking up. As it does, more airlines are interested in increasing capacity on their flights. 

Southwest recently announced that it will start making middle seats available on Dec. 1. And Delta’s CEO said it’ll likely do the same sometime in early 2021. 

Bridget Fetzer and her husband were planning to fly from Baltimore to San Diego in December, rent a convertible and drive up the coast to San Francisco. They had the tickets and everything.

“Then in October, my husband got an email from Southwest that said that they are no longer going to keep the middle seats empty on the flights,” she said.

That made them nervous. Fetzer had flown once, earlier in the pandemic, to Kentucky on a pretty empty plane. 

“There were a lot of people that weren’t wearing their masks, or like they were pulling them down below their noses and stuff like that,” Fetzer said.

And the idea of that happening on a full flight was a deal breaker. She and her husband canceled their trip. 

A lot of people do still feel safer with an empty seat next to them on a plane, said Edward Russell, who covers aviation for the travel site The Points Guy. 

“The reality, though, is that can’t continue forever,” he said. “Airlines are for-profit businesses.”

Businesses that have been hemorrhaging money for months. 

Southwest said its policy of blocking middle seats cost the airline roughly $20 million in September and could cost it up to $60 million in November. 

“American and United from early on have not blocked middle seats and shown that people are still willing to fly them,” Russell said. “They’ve seen their passenger numbers rise.”

It’s still unclear how much keeping middle seats empty could reduce the risk of getting COVID on a plane, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt. But, he said, “the closer we are to more people for prolonged periods of time in an enclosed space, our risk goes up.”

If airlines are going to fill every seat, “that makes it all the more important that everyone on the aircraft wear their masks for as long as possible,” he said.

That’s the only way Fetzer would consider getting on a full flight: If everyone was wearing a mask — correctly — the whole time. That, or the pandemic was under control.