[Infowarrior] - New plans for economy class on planes

[Richard Forno]

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/business/25seats.html?ei=5094&en=807cafd0a
fecec8b&hp=&ex=1146024000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many
passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage
should catch on: standing-room-only "seats."

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian
carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing
section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a
harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

But even short of that option, carriers have been slipping another row or
two of seats into coach by exploiting stronger, lighter materials developed
by seat manufacturers that allow for slimmer seatbacks. The thinner seats
theoretically could be used to give passengers more legroom but, in
practice, the airlines have been keeping the amount of space between rows
the same, to accommodate additional rows.

The result is an additional 6 seats on a typical Boeing 737, for a total of
156, and as many as 12 new seats on a Boeing 757, for a total of 200.

That such things are even being considered is a result of several factors.
High fuel costs, for example, are making it difficult for carriers to turn a
profit. The new seat technology alone, when used to add more places for
passengers, can add millions in additional annual revenue. The new designs
also reduce a seat's weight by up to 15 pounds, helping to hold down fuel
consumption. A typical seat in economy class now weighs 74 to 82 pounds.

"There is clearly pressure on carriers to make the total passenger count as
efficient as possible," said Howard Guy, a director for Design Q, a seating
design consultant in England. "After all, the fewer seats that are put on
board, the more expensive the seat price becomes. It's basic math."

Even as the airlines are slimming the seatbacks in coach, they are
installing seats as thick and heavy as ever in first and business class ‹
and going to great lengths to promote them. That is because each passenger
in such a seat can generate several times the revenue of a coach traveler.

At the front of the cabin, the emphasis is on comfort and amenities like
sophisticated entertainment systems. Some of the new seats even feature
in-seat electronic massagers. And, of course, the airlines have installed
lie-flat seats for their premium passengers on international routes.

Seating specialists say that all the publicity airlines devote to their
premium seats diverts attention from what is happening in the back of the
plane. In the main cabin, they say, manufacturers are under intense pressure
to create more efficient seats.

"We make the seats thinner," said Alexander Pozzi, the director for research
and development at Weber Aircraft, a seat manufacturer in Gainesville, Tex.
"The airlines keep pitching them closer and closer together. We just try to
make them as comfortable as we can."

There is one bit of good news in the thinner seats for coach class: They
offer slightly more room between the armrests because the electronics are
being moved to the seatbacks.

One of the first to use the thinner seats in coach was American Airlines,
which refitted its economy-class section seven years ago with an early
version made by the German manufacturer Recaro.

"Those seats were indeed thinner than the ones they replaced, allowing more
knee and legroom," Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, said. American
actually removed two rows in coach, adding about two inches of legroom, when
it installed the new seats. It promoted the change with a campaign called
"More Room Throughout Coach."

But two years later, to cut costs, American slid the seats closer together
and ended its "More Room" program without fanfare. When the changes were
completed last year, American said its "density modification program" had
added five more seats to the economy-class section of its MD-80 narrow-body
aircraft and brought the total seat count to 120 in the back of the plane. A
document on an internal American Airlines Web site, which was briefly
accessible to the public last week, estimated that the program would
generate an additional $60 million a year for its MD-80 fleet.

United Airlines has also used the earlier-generation thin seats. But it held
open the possibility that once its current seat stock needs to be replaced,
it might try to squeeze in more seats. "We're always looking at options,"
Brandon Borrman, a spokesman, said.

Airlines can only do so much with their existing fleets to save space. The
real opportunities, say seat manufacturers and design experts, are with the
new generation of aircraft that are coming soon.

"People hear about these new planes, and they have bowling alleys and barber
shops," Michael B. Baughan, the president and chief operating officer of B/E
Aerospace, a manufacturer of aircraft cabin interiors in Wellington, Fla.,
said with a bit of exaggeration. "But that's not how planes are delivered.
On a real airline, with real routes, you have to be economically viable."

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of a new jet that could accommodate
features unheard of previously is the Airbus A380. There is so much
available room on the superjumbo that Virgin Atlantic Airways is even
considering placing a beauty salon in its premium-class section. (No final
decision has been made, according to the company.) The first A380 is
scheduled to be delivered later this year.

With a typical configuration, the A380 will accommodate about 500
passengers. But with standing-room-only seats, the same plane could
conceivably fit in 853 passengers, the maximum it would be permitted to
carry.

"To call it a seat would be misleading," said Volker Mellert, a physics
professor at Oldenburg University in Germany, who has done research on
airline seat comfort and has seen the design. If such a configuration were
ever installed on an aircraft, he said, it would only be used on short-haul
flights like an island-hopping route in Japan.

While an Airbus spokeswoman, Mary Anne Greczyn, played down the idea that
Airbus was trying to sell an aircraft that accommodated 853 passengers, the
company would not specifically comment on the upright-seating proposal.

There is no legal barrier to installing standing-room seats on an American
airliner. The Federal Aviation Administration does not mandate that a
passenger be in a sitting position for takeoffs and landings; only that the
passenger be secured. Seating must comply only with the agency's rules on
the width of aisles and the ability to evacuate quickly in an emergency.

The Air Transport Association, the trade association for the airline
industry in the United States, does not have any seat-comfort standards. Nor
does it issue any recommendations to its members regarding seating
configurations.

The two Asian airlines seen as the most likely to buy a large plane for
short-haul flights, All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, are lukewarm
about the Airbus plan.

"Airbus had talked with us about an 800-seat configuration for domestic
flights," said Rob Henderson, a spokesman for All Nippon Airways. "It does
not fit with our present plans going forward."

A spokesman for Japan Airlines, Geoffrey Tudor, said Airbus had presented
its ideas for using the A380 on short-haul flights, but added, "We have no
interest in increasing seat capacity to this level."

Boeing is under similar pressure to squeeze more seats onto its newest
aircraft, the midsize Boeing 787. Some airlines are planning to space the
seats just 30 inches apart from front to back, or about one inch less than
the current average.

And rather than installing eight seats across the two aisles, which would
afford passengers additional elbow room, more than half of Boeing's airline
customers have opted for a nine-abreast configuration in the main cabin,
said Blake Emery, a marketing director at Boeing. Even so, he said, "It will
still be as comfortable as any economy-class section today."

Indeed, it is possible to have it both ways: more comfortable seats that are
also more compact. For example, the latest economy-class seat from B/E
Aerospace, called the ICON, allows the seat bottom to move forward when the
seat is reclined, so that it does not steal legroom from the passenger
behind it. It also incorporates better ergonomic designs now typically found
in the business-class cabin.

But the ICON and similar seats can cost up to three times more than the
$1,200 that a standard coach seat costs. That may make them unaffordable to
all but a few international airlines that would use the seats on long-haul
routes, the experts said.

Some frequent fliers, asked about the slimmer seats, said they feared that
the result would be tighter quarters. Some expressed concerns about sharing
a cabin with even more passengers and increasing the risk of contracting a
communicable disease.

Others were worried about even more passengers sharing the already-tight
overhead bin space.

"It seems like every year there is less room for my long legs," said Bud
Johnson, who is a frequent traveler for a military contractor in Scottsdale,
Ariz. "I'm afraid that's going to continue."