A Clever Way to Make Flying Suckier for the Rich

And airlines are gonna love it.
Image may contain Advertisement Collage and Poster

You might not know it from the way airlines stuff you into economy class and squeeze you for every last dollar, but they make the real money off the folks at the front of the plane.

And while business and first class fliers pay plenty for the luxuriant leg room, edible food, and huge screens, they too suffer the machinations of an industry that relentlessly profits. The airlines' latest weapon? A seating system that gives business travelers all the goodies, yet packs them in more tightly than ever.

This Tetris-like innovation, called "Optima," comes from aviation design studio Acumen, which introduced the schema at last week's Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Germany. The patented setup is a twist on the more typical “herringbone” seating configuration. On airlines like American, Virgin Atlantic, and Qatar Airways, business class seats sit two-by-two, pivoted toward each other but protected by screens for max solitude.

Here, passengers sit in one of two types of rows. In the first, what we'll call seats A and B are right next to one another, both pointing straight ahead, with a "privacy screen" between them. They're flanked ahead and behind by the other sort of row, in which the two seats—C and D—angle away from the center of the plane. When they're lying flat, the folks in seats A and B slide their feet under the side tables of neighbors C and D.

And so, everyone gets their standard goodies—aisle access, a lie-flat seat, sightlines that don't intersect with strangers'—and enough privacy to pretend there's nobody enjoying the same high life just a few inches away.

If this layout looks familiar, maybe you’ve recently ponied up for business class on United. Acumen hooked up with the airline to debut its Polaris seating system, which uses a similar configuration. But Polaris is only for United, while Optima can be purchased by anyone, for any airline.

“We started to develop the generic version we could cater to the rest of the world market, to every potential supplier, with every perceivable option for stowage, with more privacy, less privacy,” says Richard Nicholas, a senior designer with the firm. The options are endless, and this design is meant to take them all into account.

It's not often airlines get to consider a new type of seat, let alone a whole new seating system. It takes years to design the things, test them, and get them certified for flight. They must be light, to keep fuel costs down. They must be durable, and easy to fix, and quick to clean. And they must look timeless.

“If you design something this year and bring on the market this year, it still has to fit the market in 25 years,” says Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, an industrial designer with Iowa State University who specializes in transportation.

And, you have to keep it flexible, depending on what airlines, and their customers, want. "One man’s privacy is another man’s claustrophobia,” says Anthony Harcup, the firm’s associate director. But hey, at least there's champagne.