Coming Soon: Lay-Flat Seats in Economy. Aw Yiss.

No more napping on your neighbor’s shoulder

By The Editors
March 22, 2016 9:00 am

You’ll have to check us on this, but we’re fairly certain that the smallest known measure of length is the average reclining distance of an airline seat in economy.

And yet it’s still enough to make you jab your knees into the back of that guy’s seat in an effort to make him assume the upright position.

Solving for both: a new prototype from Formation Design for an integrated cabin with lie-flat seats that will allow economy passengers to fully recline during flight.

Using an overlapping 3D design to take advantage of all available space in the plane, Formation’s cabin stacks business class suites slightly above the lie-flat economy seats and allows for more seat density than current lie-flat configurations allow.

After the design concept was nominated for a Crystal Cabin Award (aka “the aircraft-cabin Oscars’), Formation partner Robert Henshaw pointed to other industries such as hospitality and train travel that have embraced the notion of premium and standard customers sharing space in order to maximize profit.

“It’s very expensive real estate flying around and you want to get as much use out of it as you can,” he says. “I do think there’s a lot of innovation that’s yet to happen in that space, with the lie-flat cabin.”

Of course, this being a good idea and the airline industry being the airline industry, don’t expect implementation to occur anytime too soon.

Images via Formation Design 

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