The article states that reducing leg room from 32 to 31 inches allowed for one additional seat row. Which means that there were already no less than 32 rows on those planes. Six seats per row give 192 passengers. RITA numbers clearly show that the load factor have never exceeded 90% since 2010. That means that at least 10% of seats were empty, that is, 19 seats. There is no sense of adding another 6 seats just to have them empty. If there were a demand for six seats, the people demanding them would just have occupied those of 19 free ones. Adding another row only makes sense if the plane is full and there's additional demand for seats. We should have looked at the load factor distribution, not only at it's mean value. Most attentively we should have looked at the standard deviation of the load factor around it's mean, but RITA didn't provide such an information.