This might be a tempting answer choice, but remember that the question stem asks us to improve the prospects of reducing fatalities, beyond the improvements made by the author's proposal. If the author's proposal is implemented, all the airplanes belonging to an airline will already have unrestricted access to emergency exits, because the seats will be removed — and since nothing restricts this proposal only to airplanes already owned by airlines, presumably, if new planes are purchased with the old seat layout, those seats will have to be removed too.

In other words, this answer choice is redundant: it only leads to the same result — airplanes where no seats are blocking the emergency exits — that the author's proposal already ensures. Meanwhile, remember that there is another factor driving these collisions: the number of flights operated by airlines. The author's proposal has already covered the problem of access to emergency exits — a proposal that would actually help reduce fatalities even further would have to address the number of flights, which plays a causal role in the number of collisions. This proposal doesn't do that.

This is correct. Remember that the stimulus mentions two cause-and-effect relationships: first, the increase in the number of flights operated by airlines, which causes the increase in collisions in the first place; and second, the seats blocking the emergency exits, which cause the number of fatalities in these collisions to be higher than it would otherwise be.

The author's proposal addresses the second of these cause-and-effect relationships, but not the first one. Even if all the seats in the way of the emergency exits are removed, if the airlines keep increasing the number of flights they operate to compensate for it, the collisions that would ensue might still cause a high number of fatalities. A proposal like this one, which at least ensures the number of flights will not increase just to offset the decrease in seats, helps ensure that won't happen.

Irrelevant. Passenger check-in procedures don't matter for reducing fatalities in collisions.

Irrelevant. Airport security measures don't matter for reducing fatalities in collisions.

Irrelevant. Ticket prices don't have anything to do with fatalities from collisions.