Sit down, you’re rocking the boat

Last year, Airbus announced that it was working with Recaro on a basic supplier-furnished seat, as opposed to the usual buyer-furnished equipment. Essentially, airlines with small sales teams or without the scale to secure favourable pricing can tick a box on their aircraft order to include economy seating.

This year, Boeing followed suit, but with an unknown, unproven company called Lift by EnCore. After asking both Lift and Boeing for the reasons why the latter selected the former, the only real answer seemed to be the relationships the two founders had with Boeing. The seat itself is relatively sub-par, having seemingly failed to match ergonomic improvements in competing seats like situating the seats at a level for decent shin clearance, and ensuring that the structural support for the seat is kept away from the outside edges, in order to enable extra space for knees.

So why is this push towards smaller seatmakers happening now? A large part is consolidation in the seat sector, with names like Contour, Weber, threesixty and numerous others disappearing and Zodiac, B/E Aerospace and Recaro beginning to dominate. With size comes complexity, however, and the larger seatmakers have in some ways chosen economies of scale and modular systems over customising products for individual airlines. Delivery delays have also plagued the industry, creating the perfect storm that has enabled a few hardy startups to punch through to success.

From an airline’s point of view, if the risk of going with a new supplier is that the seats might not be delivered on time, while established producers are experiencing exactly that problem, it’s understandable that carriers are looking more widely for their seats.

That’s especially true for the more agile smaller seatmakers, who can customise their product for the airlines. Mirus, for example, is creating a 17. 3in Hawk seat for AirAsia’s A320 aircraft, which is a good 0. 7in narrower than it needs to be. The extra aisle space speeds up boarding and disembarkation, reducing costs for the quick-turn low-cost carrier’s flights. Mirus’ seat also has significantly fewer moving parts than the seat it replaces, which is a direct cost benefit to AirAsia.

At the other end of the market, Aviointeriors unveiled its Columbus C4 seat, a fully featured upmarket economy product – not proper premium economy, but a decent seat for either generously pitched regular economy or extra-legroom sections of economy cabins. With articulation, headrests, ergonomically engineered padding and adjustability to enable passengers to find just the right angle for them, it’s a very promising development.

No airline has yet ordered the Rebel Aero seat, a fixed-back product where half of the 4in-deep seat pan flips up to create either a booster seat for small children or a breakfast bar style high perch for grownups. It won the Crystal Cabin Award in its class, but there are more than a few issues with its design – from the over-shoulder belt to the odd headrest to the overall weirdness – that mean actual sales and finding it on an aircraft will be later rather than sooner.

Yet the big boys aren’t taking the new kids on the block lying down. Recaro is showing its new BL3710, a carbon fibre concept even thinner than the slimmest of its existing lines (as seen on Lufthansa, say). It looks impossibly thin, but it is surprisingly comfortable given the competition, and the carbon fibre is particularly decent as a defence against the old knee-in-lower-back problem of tightly pitched slimline seating.

New big boys are emerging, though. As super-slimline, Eames-inspired Acro has evolved over the last few years and started to see success in the LCC market, it has turned from a couple of blokes with a postage stamp-sized booth to a large designer stand with a full squad of new hires.

The good thing is, it’s mostly good news for the passenger. More companies means more innovation, and that means that even as official pitch continues to shrink, clever design can carve out a bit more space from the same official measurements.