Read about the bold leap British Airways took with seating from Chapter 2/Business-Class Comfort.
Jetliner Cabins
by Jennifer Coutts Clay
Published by J. Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-470-01933-6
2006
Laminated softcover edition
224 pages
450+ mostly color pictures
List price US$55
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JETLINER CABINS, first published in hardcover in 2003, is the first comprehensive survey of the commercial-aircraft cabin environment from the late seventies to the turn of the millennium. This book develops and greatly expands on the author’s series of articles which appeared in Aircraft Interiors magazine from 2000 to 2002.
The updated softcover edition, published in 2006, showcases the high-efficiency next-generation aircraft: Airbus A380-800; Boeing B787 Dreamliner; Bombardier CSeries; Embraer E-Jets, the Legacy and the Phenom 100 and 300; and exciting new passenger-service products for first, business and economy class.
Author Statement
Although nearly 2 billion passengers per year travel on the scheduled airlines worldwide, until now there have been no books devoted specifically to the subject of jetliner cabins. My survey provides a summary of the developments that have taken place during the era of mass affordable air travel. In the past 25 years airlines have spent fortunes on interior upgrade programmes – to comply with escalating regulatory requirements, to address individual customer needs and to differentiate themselves from their competitors. What do passengers get for their money? How are new products such as sleeper seats and lounge bars integrated into existing floor plans? Why do some cabin environments feel more welcoming than others? This book is where readers will find answers to some of these difficult questions.
Excerpt from Jetliner Cabins Chapter 2/Business-Class Comfort
This image is featured in Jetliner Cabins, Chapter 2/Business-Class Comfort, by Jennifer Coutts Clay, www.jetlinercabins.com, published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Courtesy British Airways.
“In the summer of 2000, British Airways once again took a bold leap into the future. Challenging the entire industry, the airline introduced a completely new concept for the business-class section of its long-haul fleet. The change in the cabin layout was amazing: the configuration is 2+2+2 across the wide-body, twin-aisle aircraft. The seats, or capsules, are positioned in pairs, each consisting of one seat facing forward and one facing the rear of the aircraft, and each seat converts into a 72-inch (1.83-metre), fully flat bed. At each position, there is an adjustable footstool, an adjustable headrest with movable neck support, a movable privacy screen, a personal power-supply outlet for laptop computers, and a video screen offering multi-channel entertainment. On-board stowage space for carry-on bags has been greatly increased, and the allowance per passenger has been raised to 39.68 pounds (18 kilograms).
As with the airline’s first-class product, the new British Airways business-class beds are carefully designed to meet the requirements of North Atlantic business travellers.
To some passengers, the ‘protective brace position’ of the rear-facing seats seemed strange at first: they were asked to sit well back in their seats, with their hands crossed over the centre of their chests. Some critics predicted that commercial airline passengers would want to fly only feet first, as they have for many years. But, if we look at the history of military air transport, it considered normal, and some say safer, for people to fly facing the rear of the aircraft. In the 1970s, on the Trident 2 aircraft, half the passengers flew backward and half did not – imagine the eye contact – and this configuration has a long tradition in other modes transportation, for example on buses, boats and trains (See Chapter 15/Upgrades: Refurbishing Aloft, Alaska Airlines).”
Cover Story
Since Jetliner Cabins was first published in 2003 (the centenary of the Wright brothers’ first flight), I have received several requests for more information about the cover picture. Enquiries have included: “It looks a bit like an Airbus aircraft – but which one?”; “Please confirm whether this is a Boeing jet?”; and “Why the 2+1+2 configuration?”
The answer? The computer-simulated picture contains architectural and design elements associated with aircraft produced by both manufacturers. The ingenious wraparound treatment was the brilliant brainchild of Christoph Berg, the director of ACA, which specialises in computer graphics, and whose words of wisdom are quoted in Chapter 15/Upgrades: Refurbishing Aloft. The aim was to concentrate attention on a generic cabin environment rather than comparing the characteristics of individual aircraft types. Featuring a wide-body twin-aisle aircraft makes it clear that we are dealing with modern jetliners – as opposed to the older aircraft types (which were all single-aisle)
The double-seat units fitted nicely along the sidewalls – but how to handle the spine of the book? One single seat in a row is unusual but not unknown. For example, in the 1980s, Pan Am flew individual centreline seats near the front of its first-class cabins, and Singapore Airlines currently uses a similar configuration for its luxurious SkySuites on its Boeing B747 fleet.
Working from the superlative aviation-grade collections at Lantal Textiles, Monika Luethi, Lantal’s director of design (whose valuable comments appear in Chapter 12/The Leather Forecast), coordinated a group of decorative patterns for the carpet, curtain fabric and seat-cover upholstery. The organic motifs illustrate a number of points covered in those sections of the book that focus on the soft elements of cabin décor schemes. As shown in our picture, the favourite secondary-accent options ranged from eye-catching yellow and ecologically correct green to the classic, winning blue (a topic debated in detail by Lantal and others in Chapter 13/Flying Colours).