Legroom Tight Now? New Seat Is Less Spacious...
Read more …Legroom Tight Now? New Seat Is Less Spacious
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: September 20, 2010, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“LIKE riding a horse,” said Dominique Menoud, the director general of Aviointeriors, the Italian aircraft seat manufacturer, after I had slid into the company’s new “stand-up” airplane seat on display last week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas trade show. As television cameras poked around the display seats for angles, Mr. Menoud asked me, “It is very comfortable, no?”
“No,” I replied, though Mr. Menoud, beaming, seemed to take that as an assent.
I didn’t argue, but it was definitely not comfortable, although the seat, under the name SkyRider, is being promoted as resembling a horse saddle. I wasn’t buying that either. I have ridden many a horse, and the SkyRider seat is nothing like being in the saddle, whether Western or English. Sitting in one was more like being wedged, legs braced, on a stationary bicycle.
Still, I give the folks at Aviointeriors credit for finally bringing this thing out. Long rumored and joked about, the so-called stand-up airplane seat has now emerged from the imagination, the drawing board and the factory and into the bright lights. The SkyRider introduction was easily the most talked about event of the trade show.
The seat is being marketed mostly for shorter haul flights of two hours or so. But Mr. Menoud said that the seats could also be used on flights up to four hours.
Aviointeriors said the seat allowed for a new basic class of seating with a “much reduced seat pitch.” Most coach seats have 31 or 32 inches of pitch, the industry definition of the distance between one point in a seat and the same point in the seat ahead. A few discount airlines have seats with 28 inches of pitch, but the SkyRider is intended to have 23 inches or less, depending on how an airline installs it.
Now, before a seat like the SkyRider would actually turn up on airplanes, there remain various hurdles — chief among them safety concerns about emergency evacuations from planes with passengers crammed into such tight spaces. But experts in cabin interior engineering from the two major aircraft manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, briefly discussed the stand-up seat during a panel presentation at the show and, while both were skeptical about its marketability, neither dismissed the idea out of hand.
Have any airlines signed up? “No, but we are in discussions right now, and there is a lot of interest from carriers around the world,” Mr. Menoud said. He would not identify which airlines his company has been talking to, but said two of them are carriers in the United States.
Even before the trade show, Ryanair, the brassy European discount carrier, had said it hoped to win regulatory approval to put rows of stand-up seats, with the cheapest fares, in rear sections of its planes. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, recently said on British television said the airline was thinking of taking out some existing seats to install “the equivalent of 10 rows of standing area.”
“LIKE riding a horse,” said Dominique Menoud, the director general of Aviointeriors, the Italian aircraft seat manufacturer, after I had slid into the company’s new “stand-up” airplane seat on display last week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas trade show. As television cameras poked around the display seats for angles, Mr. Menoud asked me, “It is very comfortable, no?”
“No,” I replied, though Mr. Menoud, beaming, seemed to take that as an assent.
I didn’t argue, but it was definitely not comfortable, although the seat, under the name SkyRider, is being promoted as resembling a horse saddle. I wasn’t buying that either. I have ridden many a horse, and the SkyRider seat is nothing like being in the saddle, whether Western or English. Sitting in one was more like being wedged, legs braced, on a stationary bicycle.
Still, I give the folks at Aviointeriors credit for finally bringing this thing out. Long rumored and joked about, the so-called stand-up airplane seat has now emerged from the imagination, the drawing board and the factory and into the bright lights. The SkyRider introduction was easily the most talked about event of the trade show.
The seat is being marketed mostly for shorter haul flights of two hours or so. But Mr. Menoud said that the seats could also be used on flights up to four hours.
Aviointeriors said the seat allowed for a new basic class of seating with a “much reduced seat pitch.” Most coach seats have 31 or 32 inches of pitch, the industry definition of the distance between one point in a seat and the same point in the seat ahead. A few discount airlines have seats with 28 inches of pitch, but the SkyRider is intended to have 23 inches or less, depending on how an airline installs it.
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