The slow evolution of economy seats

In April, Spirit Airlines will introduce its latest seat design as it brings new Airbus A320-series planes into its fleet.

For an airline, the seats, designed by Hong Kong-based Haeco Cabin Solutions, will tick off several of the boxes carriers are desirous of as they update interiors, including increasing passenger comfort and reducing weight.

Carefully engineered, angled seat legs will move each row of three closer to the aircraft frame, enabling Spirit to carve out a half inch of additional width per seat without narrowing the aisle.

The seats will also have headrests, a first for Spirit aside from its higher-priced Big Front Seat offering. And, said Lania Rittenhouse, Spirit’s vice president of guest experience, improved padding in the seat bottoms will further increase comfort. 

Spirit has accomplished these changes without having to reduce the number of seats it puts on its planes. In addition, even with the headrest and added seat padding, Rittenhouse said, each seat is 11 ounces lighter than the last ones Spirit introduced, in 2019. That might not sound like much, but it adds up to 120 pounds of weight reduction per aircraft, saving money on fuel and lowering emissions. 

The seats, though not yet flying, have drawn insider praise.

“It’s wonderful to see,” said Joe Leader, CEO of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX), whose members include airlines and vendors to the airline industry.

Leader said that he was also impressed with Spirit’s 2019 seat introduction, featuring curved seatbacks designed to offer additional space at knee level. That design element has been carried forward to the newest seats.

The incremental changes being put forward by Spirit illustrate what Leader says is the current airline trend of introducing more fuel-efficient and comfortable economy seats but within the tighter cabin configurations that carriers implemented as revenue-building measures in recent decades.

But while the seats have drawn plaudits, the fact that changes of an inch here or there are noteworthy could be viewed as emblematic of another airline industry dynamic: the general reluctance by carriers to implement more radical changes in economy seats.

Business class seats, which used to resemble the first class seats often found today on short-haul, domestic flights, have evolved over the past two decades into sophisticated machines that almost universally lie flat. Meanwhile, many airlines around the globe have introduced a whole new cabin of seats called premium economy over the past decade or so. And within economy cabins, carriers are enlarging overhead bins, adding power adapters and, in many cases, adding or improving seatback entertainment systems. 

But dating back to the 1950s, said industry veteran Ben Bettell, who is a project director for aircraft interiors with U.K.-based Counterpoint Market Intelligence, economy seats have largely been the same. Yes, they’ve gotten lighter, smaller and more durable. But just like six decades ago, they all face forward in evenly aligned rows.

“They are making small changes. But the bottom line is, it’s very small changes,” Bettell said of airlines. 

New ideas just don’t fly for some

The dearth of more dramatic developments isn’t a result of a lack of ideas. For example, Bettell said, various seat manufacturers have proposed economy layouts in which some of the seats faced forward while others faced backward. One of those concepts, proposed in 2006 by a company that has since become part of the aircraft seat manufacturing giant Safran, would have aligned two forward-facing seats against one backward-facing seat. The configuration would have offered airline passengers two extra inches of space between rows on Boeing 777s, Bettell said, even while rewarding carriers with an 8% increase in the plane’s total seat count. 

But airlines didn’t bite, in part because it would have forced passengers to face one another. 

“That didn’t work in a lot of cultures,” Bettell said. 

Existing proposals include economy class bunk seating, which would enable flyers to lie flat at a higher seat density than in business class. Once such concept, the Economy Sky Dream designed by Netherlands-based engineering firm ADSE, would utilize overhead space in the center section of widebodies for bunkbeds. Instead of central overhead bins, two beds would be stacked above rows of three seats during takeoff, landing and meal service. During other portions of the flight, the central bed would move downward, and a ladder would release to provide access to the middle and top bunks. The bank of three seats would be repurposed as the bottom bunk. 

Bettell said that stacked seating concepts, while intriguing, face a variety of challenges, including certification amid concerns about the impact they could have on evacuation times.

Yet another innovative economy seating concept has been designed by Lakewood, Colo.-based Molon Labe Seating, and this one has already received FAA certification. The company’s S1 Space Seat, designed for short-haul travel, offers a staggered design in which the middle seat sits 2.1 inches lower than the aisle and window seats and is also set back from those seats by 2 to 3 inches. 

Staggering the seats enables Molon Labe to offer an unusually wide middle seat by industry economy class standards while still offering aisle and window seats of standard width. In addition, the staggered design reduces the frustrating armrest competition that so often plagues economy flyers. The S1 armrests have an elevated front half and a lower back half, creating separate spaces for each passenger to rest his or her arms. 

The staggered concept is a favorite of Leader from APEX. 

“I believe that’s an innovation that will happen over this decade,” he said. 

But even though the S1 received certification in 2019, and the weight of the seat is competitive, Molon Labe has yet to complete a sale. 

Company founder and CEO Hank Scott blames, in part, a cultural aversion to risk among airline industry executives. 

“Everyone wants to be a CEO or a vice president,” he said. “They don’t want to rock the boat.”

Still, Scott remains optimistic. 

“We know we have a solution,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the industry to realize they need the solution, and I think that will be driven by passenger dissatisfaction.”

Jean-Christophe Gaudeau, vice president of marketing for Safran, said there’s some truth to the gripes that airlines are simply conservative when it comes to the evolution of economy seats. But, he said, much of the reluctance is actually driven by consumers. For example, when Safran shopped concepts with seats facing each other, flyers rejected them. 

“It wasn’t the airlines,” he said. “It was the passengers. They said, ‘You are crazy.’”

Safran’s lengthy journey to successfully placing its inventive You Dream economy headrest design on an airline illustrates how challenging it can be to develop and introduce economy seat innovations. 

Safran, along with Collins Aerospace and Recaro, control 75% of the annual $75 million global economy seat market, according to Counterpoint Market Intelligence. Still, by the time of You Dream’s slated 2024 debut on an as yet undisclosed airline, it will have been five years in the works. 

The headrest rotates, affording support to flyers not only when they are leaning back but also if they want to lean their head and neck to the sides. It will be deployed by its first buyer on long-haul aircraft. 

While You Dream may not strike many as a mind-blowingly creative concept, developing such an item for an aircraft is more complicated than many would imagine. 

“Making it work, per se, is not the toughest part,” said Gaudeau. “What it makes more difficult is how you certify it. Anything you put on the seats, no matter how simple it might be, might have some challenges in certification.”

He added that in designing You Dream, Safran also had to consider complexities such as making it easy to maintain and for the cover to be exchangeable. Another key design consideration was limiting the impact the product would have on flight attendant workloads.

Challenges aside, genuinely transformative innovations have not been entirely absent in the economy seat sector over the past several decades. Air New Zealand, in particular, stands out as a carrier that has been willing to push convention. 

Back in 2010, the airline debuted its Economy Skycouch, which transforms a row of three economy seats into a short couch by extending flaps that tuck underneath the seats.

A handful of other airlines have since come forth with a similar offering, including Fiji Airway’s My Island product and Lufthansa’s Sleeper’s Row. 

Potentially more transformative could be Air New Zealand’s Economy Skynest, which it plans to introduce on ultralong-haul routes, likely including to the U.S., beginning with the delivery of new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners next year. 

While Skynest isn’t as far reaching as the ADSE’s Economy Sky Dream concept would be, it will at long last introduce sleepers in economy cabins. 

The Skynest will be an enclosed pod of six bunks separated into two stacked rows of three. The pod will be located within the economy cabin but will not serve as a stand-alone seat product. Instead, flyers will be able to purchase a bunk as an add-on to their standard economy seat.

Though some details of the product have yet to be released, the carrier has previously said it envisions customers purchasing a Skynest bed for just a portion of their flight, enabling them a chance to lie down at a more affordable price than a business class seat.

The Skynest is still going through certification. But it’s a process that Rob Semple, who works alongside Bettell at Counterpoint Market Intelligence, said should be relatively straightforward because the Skynest pod won’t be used on takeoff and landing and because it is similar in key respects to storage closets that Air New Zealand already has in its Dreamliner aircraft.

Change takes time

Other ongoing innovations in the economy seat market tend to be evolutionary, like Spirit’s news seats, rather than revolutionary. But those changes nevertheless involve sophisticated engineering.

Weights of short-haul, economy seats have been reduced from approximately 33 pounds in the 1950s and ’60s to about half of that now, Bettell said, even while regulations now require seats to be able to withstand 16 Gs crash force compared to the standard in those days of 9 Gs. 

Paul Norris, the vice president of sales and marketing for the multinational aircraft seat cushion and accessories design firm Franklin Products, said that it engineers for four pillars: comfort, cost, durability and weight. 

“It’s very difficult to maximize all four,” he said. “Anyone can sell you a softer, lighter product, but will it actually withstand the rigors of aviation use?”

Franklin deploys various techniques, including pressure mapping, in its effort to deliver an optimum product to seat manufacturers, and through them, to airlines. 

Pressure mapping helps the company design for softer padding where it is most needed, while minimizing foam elsewhere to save weight. Norris said Franklin likes to push for soft padding under thighs, for example, and he added that it’s important to have good cushioning at the front of the seat. But he also explained that pressure points vary according to an individual’s height, with shorter people placing more pressure on the front of seats, while taller people tend to sit deeper in the seat. 

The company also builds seats with as many as four layers of padding in higher-end economy products, with firm bottom layers for durability and softer top layers for comfort.

Norris said that airlines are sometimes slow to embrace Franklin innovations that he believes could provide benefits across those pillars of comfort, cost, durability and weight. 

Still, the company continues its efforts to break new ground. 

Right now, for example, Franklin is working on a seatback product called FlyRight that would utilize mesh rather than the cushioning typically found there. Norris said FlyRight will offer more comfort while being lighter than existing seatback comfort solutions.

Time will tell whether airlines take on the product, and if so, whether passengers like it. But either way, Bettell cautions that in economy cabins, it’s folly for flyers to expect too much. 

“The airlines are going to make money,” he said. “They are nothing more than a bus. You can’t spend $29 and think you’re going to get a first class seat.”