US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.

This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.

Asking families if their teenager could be seated separately is one thing, but knowing the airlines, they might as well start seating the toddlers in the overhead luggage compartments.

The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.

Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

So then just pile them up without knocking them out.

Can you fit more people in horizontal than if they stood up and you had little straps to hang onto like a subway?

In theory yes because you can use the space at the top that would otherwise be above people's heads. No guarantee they get to their destination alive though.