Room for one more?

The answer: cut aisle space, narrow the armrests throughout, and create a window seat with narrower seat cushion, 2/3 the foot room of a normal seat and a half-sized armrest that juts out at an angle from the seat pan. Since the inch count between the armrests hasn’t shrunk, Airbus argues it hasn’t actually made the seats smaller, but that’s not quite right.

And it’s a far cry from Airbus’s previous “eighteen inches for all” campaign, which made the most of the European airframer’s fuselage width choices across the A300/310/330/340, A320, A350 XWB and A380 cross-sections to suggest – in an interesting B2B2C marketing move – that Airbus customers’ customers choose Airbus rather than Boeing. (It certainly never stopped Airbus from selling sub-17in seats in a 3-3-3 configuration on, say, a charter A310 or AirAsia X’s A330, of course. ) The first shock of the new layout is the centre row of five, which will be familiar to Australians flying Malaysia Airlines’ 2-5-2 layout Boeing 777‑200ER fleet, among other airlines electing for the configuration first popularised by the DC-10/MD‑11. (While your columnist recalls numerous happy tri-jet red-eye flights at the back of economy stretched out across five seats in the centre section – in the days before fully flat beds, no less – as load factor forecasting and yield management improved, this layout moved from a pleasure to a terror. ) Climbing over two passengers without the mollifying factor of a window is bad enough, but measuring tape in hand, your columnist pawed (and pored) over both the Geven and B/E Aerospace-designed 11-abreast A380 seats, sat in them, and the surprising verdict is: the centre seat is actually less dreadful than the window seat.

The window seat problem is all about the shape of the A380’s massive fuselage.

With the maximum width point of the cabin above shoulder level, space at foot level is problematic once you push seats closer and closer to the wall. The sidewall is sculpted in such a way that the window passenger loses about six inches of floor space compared with their 18in of between-armrest width. Anyone who’s flown in a window seat on an aircraft like QantasLink’s Bombardier Q400 will have experienced the vented curving fuselage sidewall cutting into their legroom. That’s fine onThe window seat problem is all about the shape of the A380’s massive fuselage. a flight of less than an hour, but for an aircraft that operates the world’s longest commercial flight by distance, it’s a shocker.

Airbus could have gone some way to resolving the window seat issue with its proposition from last year (which never made it out from under wraps): raise the height of the main deck floor by two inches and gain both floor and elbow space. The problem with raising the floor, of course, is weight and development time. With the A380’s dwindling order book, not to mention a set of Malaysia Airlines superjumbos reportedly up for sale, it may not make the most sense to devote resources to raising the floor, at least until a major customer (and “major” probably means Emirates, which has openly said it doesn’t think the tradeoffs of A380 11-abreast are worth it from a passenger experience point of view) makes a buying decision.

So the window seat passenger is left with an ultra-narrow armrest on a slanted support, a sub-18in seat cushion and so little floor space that they can’t rest their feet flat on the carpet.

But here’s the question: despite the pearl-clutching gasps from passenger experience observers (and Cabin Pressure is certainly among that crowd), assuming that an airline was able to properly differentiate its products (in say a high-density rear cabin of an A380 economy deck), how much less than a 3-4-3 A380 seat would a 3-5-3 A380 seat have to be in order for you to buy it? How about a 17in wide seat on an A380 – no worse than the sub-17in options on AirAsia X, which seems to have no shortage of customers? And how much would you be willing to pay for an aisle or middle seat to avoid the 3-5-3 A380’s dreadful window seat?