Jerry and Elaine take a memorable trip on an airplane in Seinfeld season 4, episode 11, “The Airport” saw Elaine’s struggles more toned down, the writers originally intended for the character to experience a highly unusual miserable situation.
In “The Airport”, Jerry and Elaine are flying home together from St. Louis to New York City, but must rebook their flight with one seat in coach and one in first class. Jerry takes the first class seat because Elaine has never experienced it and thus wouldn’t miss it, while Elaine is stuck in the middle seat between various rude and obnoxious people. As Elaine tries to wake up the sleeping man beside her to go to the bathroom, the woman next to her loudly chews her gum, and the woman in front of her lays her seat all the way back. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Seinfeld character is subject to the many inconveniences that airplane flyers feel on every trip.
While Elaine’s experience was certainly horrible, Seinfeld’s writers wanted to make it absurdly worse for the character. The original pitch for Seinfeld’s season 4 airplane episode would have seen the man sitting next to Elaine die on a transatlantic flight. Seinfeld writer Larry Charles wanted to explore what one would do with a dead body over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with nowhere to land and nowhere to move the body. However, according to Seinfeld’s DVD commentary, NBC and Castle Rock Entertainment didn’t go for the idea, as they deemed the dead body on a plane storyline far too dark and disturbing for the series.
By this point, Seinfeld had already settled into its comedic structure and formula, with the airplane and airport locations giving the series the opportunity to expand beyond the confines of Monk's Café and Jerry Seinfeld's apartment building. Larry Charles wanted to experiment more with the series’ comedic storylines by going beyond “nothing” and, instead, seeing how one would react in a very specific situation, which is how both the original airplane plan and the final product came about. While the storyline of a man dying on a plane is certainly dark, it actually happened to one of Seinfeld’s production managers on a transatlantic flight, which follows the sitcom’s trend of pulling its many stories from the cast and crew’s real experiences.
NBC rejecting Seinfeld’s original airplane episode storyline may have actually been the best decision in the long-run, as the series didn’t typically lean into more dark and upsetting storylines. Although the situation did happen in real life, a dead body on a plane is a far less relatable circumstance for viewers at home, whereas annoying engers or seating arrangements in coach are typical experiences for airplane flyers. Jerry and George's sitcom pilot was already expanding beyond Seinfeld season 4's more relatable storylines, so NBC’s rejection helped “The Airport” maintain the show's core formula.