SWEDEN — A recent viral video has “unlocked a new fear” for airline passengers: Face-to-face seating.

On July 13, American travel influencer Megan Homme, 28, shared a five-second video on TikTok. In it, she films herself blinking at the camera, nonplussed, before switching to the back camera to show that she's currently in a plane seat.

Her seat is in one of two rows arranged to face each other, with Ms Homme nearly touching toes with the opposite passenger.

“I've never seen this on a flight before,” she writes in the video. “WHY.”

Ms Homme, who has 379,200 followers on TikTok and 137,000 followers on Instagram, did not name the airline.

In the past month, the video has already garnered 8.4 million views, 886,000 likes and 3,760 comments.

Netizens have responded to Ms Homme's video with similar sentiments of horror and confusion, with a common reaction being “absolutely not”.

Most cited anxiety and introversion as reasons, saying they “would rather not have a socially awkward conversation at 30,000 feet in the air”.

“I'll swim,” declared a top comment on TikTok.

Under the same video on her Instagram, another top comment joked: “Better to have a panic attack in a group than alone I guess.” 

Some pointed out that the seats might be intended for families. But this did not allay people's fears, as Ms Homme said that the airline “didn't even let you pick your seats”.

Still, others felt that critics were simply overreacting as the same seating arrangement has long been used in trains — and in the case of Singapore, on public buses as well.

One Instagram user said: “They do this in trains and no one complains but when it switches to a plane y'all start complaining 😭😭 It's the same concept.”

But a majority of users argued that while trains may employ the face-to-face seating arrangement, plane tickets are often much more costly than train tickets.

TikTok users also said that they “don't like (it) when trains do it either” and that they prefer to travel by air simply to avoid such a scenario.

Additionally, on buses and trains that use this seating arrangement, there is usually a wider space between the two facing rows which can also include a small table, they said. Many train seats also allow the passenger to flip the back rest so they can face either direction.

The top comment on Ms Homme's Instagram post read: “The person who designed this should really get some help.”

Netizens called for the influencer to share the name of the airline so they could avoid it, but she referred to it only as “a regional airline in Sweden”.

Others speculated that it could be Braathens Regional Airlines as it previously had the same arrangement on its ATR 72-600 aircraft model — specifically for the seats 1D, 1F, 2D and 2F.

Some shared their own experiences with back-facing seats on other airlines, with one TikTok user saying: “I flew facing the back of the plane on Southwest (Airlines) in like 2000 and I’m still dizzy from that flight.”

In June this year, a double-decker plane seat design called the Chaise Longue Economy Seat also went viral as netizens expressed worries about upper-deck passengers “farting in their faces”.