Talking about a revolution

Sometimes, the marketing works and blows away the first people to see and sit in the seats. Qatar Airways’ new Qsuite ‘superbusiness’ class certainly takes some leaps around flexibility, privacy and group travel that haven’t been combined in the same way, but it too draws on the long heritage of industrial design within the aviation industry.

Sometimes, though, the marketing doesn’t stand up to first contact with industry media and invited observers. That was, unfortunately, the case with Air New Zealand’s revolutionary Spaceseat in 2011, which the airline pitched too tightly together, was unable to economically adjust the cabin to fix, and is removing from service in favour of a more traditional premium economy product.

And it seems to be the case with Qantas’ premium economy seat, which Australian Aviation examined up close both on display at the airline’s Centre of Service Excellence the day prior to its unveiling in March, and the following week at its Flight Training Centre at its Mascot headquarters, when the airline’s Head of Customer Product and Service Development Phil Capps sat down for an in-depth discussion of the new product.

Overall, the issue is not that the seat is bad — and it’s certainly an upgrade on the 3-3-3 narrow seats down the back of the Boeing 787-9 on which it will début — it’s that the seat is average, that almost all its key features have previously been rolled out by other carriers, and that it doesn’t live up to the marketing promises.

“The Dreamliner’s Premium Economy cabin, which will offer a class leading experience and a revolutionary new seat, will be unveiled in early 2017,” Qantas’ marketing spiel said when the airline unveiled the rest of its 787. By the numbers, and by almost all the key features of the seat, the seat offers neither.

Almost all its key features have been rolled out by other carriers.

The seat’s best innovation is a remarkably supportive footrest-legrest hammock combination

One of the key issues around premium economy comfort is that of the legrest and footrest. Some carriers offer neither, but many carriers offer one that swings up from behind the knee, and some offer an additional swing-down legrest from the seat in front, although these are usually less useful for taller passengers and are often a pain in the shin for passengers who are six feet or taller.

Qantas’ solution is an impressively engineered leather-covered paddle that pivots from the bottom of the seat in front. The airline’s Phil Capps explains: “The legrest has what we’re calling a dual deployment mechanism. When it is deployed first, the legrest will present itself down. This is where you have a number of choices: you can articulate it all the way down on the floor, and the leather paddle then becomes purely a footrest. You can then telescope the leather paddle towards you, to effectively extend the legrest, and then when you release that pivot mechanism the whole legrest and foot structure will then come back up your leg to provide that support. Then you’ve got the support at the back of your calf, down the back of your shins, down your ankles and your feet. The structure at your foot is what provides you with comfort and resistance.”

The release is a single pull tab on the seatback in front, and with a little explanation your author (of 1.92m in height) was able to get quite comfortable for the few minutes of trying the product out in Qantas’ backroom. Yet the level of comfort was not substantially greater than with the low-tech solution of Air New Zealand’s purple squashy ottoman cushion from the Spaceseat, and Qantas acknowledges that the learning curve may prove tricky for some passengers.

“We’re going to be looking heavily into ways that we can introduce this to customers,” Capps notes. “We think it’s intuitive, but we need to make sure our cabin crew are well trained, we need to make sure that in all the digital interfaces — both in Qantas.com and in the IFE system — we have clear and simple ways to explain how to use it.”

Seat pitch is towards the back of the international pack

Virgin Atlantic launched the first premium economy cabin in 1992 with a 38” recliner seat, which is the same pitch as Qantas’ new seat (and indeed Qantas’ old seat). These days, that is at the bottom end of premium economy offerings, which range from 38” on many airlines serving Australia to 41” on Air New Zealand or Virgin Australia, and 42” on Japan Airlines’ latest products, with relatively small-scale international outliers including AirAsia X’s angled lie-flat seat and British Airways’ French subsidiary OpenSkies’ Boeing 757 52” cradle sleeper.

“What we’re trying to solve for is customer space and customer movement in and out of the seat,” Qantas’ Phil Capps tells Australian Aviation when we bring up the thorny topic of pitch. “To do that means we consider, absolutely, seat pitch. We also consider the seat profile, the dimensions from forward to aft of the seat, principally in the backrest and the seat shell, and also the way the seat articulates. Based on a consideration of all of those three things in the context of the seat structure, we believe that the existing 38” pitch works really well, and improves the customer experience from today. When we look at this new product across the rest of the market, we know that the pitch itself is very comparable, but what we think will make this seat amenity or comfort even greater is the way that we’ve designed this seat cushioning and structure, the way that we’ve designed the IFE to be seatback rather than in-arm, and the way that we’ve used Thompson’s articulation mechanism means that no matter what position your seat is in, or the seat in front of you is in, we’re maximising that sense of space, comfort and egress.”

Pitch affects passengers in these seats in two key ways. Firstly, in the sheer distance from knee to seatback and eyeball to inflight entertainment screen, both in upright and reclined mode. By all of these measurements, the seats feel perfectly comparable to other 38” seats. But with the greater recline of these seats, and with the fact that the inflight entertainment is seatback rather than arm-mounted, comes a greater feeling that the seatback in front is looming, especially if the person in front reclines first.

The second way pitch affects the passenger experience is in egress. One of the issues with many 38”-pitched seats, and the key reason that they haven’t previously reclined to the extent that Qantas’ seat reclines, is that ensuring passengers seated in the window or middle seat can pop out to visit the lavatory or simply stretch their legs while disturbing as few fellow passengers as possible.

Ordinarily, the more recline the better. But in this case, the extent of the recline, combined with the location of the inflight entertainment screen, tablet shelf and one of the charging sockets, means that egress will be substantially trickier than in competitors’ seats. While this is to an extent mitigated by the seat pivoting relatively high up the seatback, it does not resolve the issue that, on balance, these seats look and feel too close together.

Given that the market for premium economy will increasingly be older upmarket leisure travellers who may be less mobile than average, as well as taller or wider passengers feeling the 3-3-3 Boeing 787 configuration squeeze in economy, this pitch decision may well prove unwise.

Inflight entertainment is crucial, but is the dual-screening opportunity missed?

Qantas’ latest-generation Panasonic Avionics inflight entertainment screen measures 13.3” on the diagonal, similar to what’s currently flying on Singapore Airlines and has been announced by Delta and Philippine Airlines. On ultra-longhaul flights (and the international tag flight between Perth and Melbourne for the London connection) a big screen is a big plus.

Qantas’ Phil Capps promises “not just early release movies, but some of our increasingly rich TV content, music content — but beyond that the ability for customers, more than they ever have before, to build playlists and curate their own IFE experience. It’s partly about the hardware, and partly about the content and the software that sits behind it.” Some of that curation, Capps notes, may also involve being able to save playlists and continue watching content across flights, which is something of a holy grail for the inflight entertainment industry.

But it’s 2017, and the rise of dual-screening at home and the expectation that Qantas’ Dreamliners will have some form of inflight connectivity means that making provisions for passengers’ own personal electronic devices — phones, tablets, ereaders, and so on — is equally crucial.

Qantas’ version of the now-standard PED holder, is essentially a movable metal rim shelf around the outside of the IFE screen that can be pulled towards the passenger in order to slot in the device. The upside: passengers don’t have to hold the device. The downside: dual-screening is obviously out, and the PED holder is next to the underpowered 0.5A USB outlet that won’t even keep a modern device at the same level of charge during use. Other airlines have solved this slightly less elegantly, with a groove or slot in the tray table, and there seems little reason for Qantas not to have also designed this as an option.

The tension between power and weight: not just for engines any more

The power situation is also raising eyebrows. Qantas is offering just one 110V AC power point between two passengers, or two between three in the centre sections. For a sixteen-hour flight, that may not prove to be enough, although the location of the power point in the centre console does mean an upgrade to two sockets is relatively straightforward.

The power situation also raises questions.

More problematic is the USB situation. Each passenger gets one 2A USB 2 Type-A power socket in the centre armrest, but one 0.5A version next to the screen. Most modern phones and almost all tablets require 2A to maintain a charge during use, let alone top up. Indeed, many passengers used to the 1A USB outlets already discover that their phones do not gain charge during use.

Explaining Qantas’ thinking, Phil Capps notes that “we want to provide a very close charging point on the assumption that what customers will be doing with their device when it is on the seatback is watching rather than consuming multiple pieces of software, which is why we have the lighter charge built into the seatback compared with the high-power USB built into the console.”

“The USB point in the seat back will maintain charge on most if not all devices that we’ve tested during the development of this seat, whilst a device is being used to display content — movies, TV or whatever else. Obviously that takes up less of a charge in the device than other activities,” Capps suggests, although with the rise of high-definition content this may not be that clear cut. “We wanted to make sure that we weren’t also forcing customers to, if we swapped the locations around, have their devices only charging when they’re on the seatback. Particularly when they’re sleeping, they like to have their devices closer to them.”

This logic seems contrary: the only time when 0.5A will realistically add charge to a modern device is when it is asleep.

“Theoretically you could put two high-power USB locations on the seat, but that wasn’t the best match to the demand profile that we understand when we tested this with customers. Whilst we’re always thinking of the customer, we’re also mindful of weight,” Capps says. “Adding incremental power capability on the seats, particularly in front-row locations, would have driven more weight than the demand for customers would drive us to. That’s why we have the lower powered USB outlet in the back of the seat in front, to keep devices charging while customers are watching, and keep a higher power one next to the console, which is where they’re more likely to be working with iPads in a more work oriented-way or have multiple applications open.”

Indeed, ensuring adequate power does add weight in that larger and heavier power distribution systems are required. However, a manufacturer of these systems (which requested not to be named owing to industry sensitivities) suggests that the weight implications per seat of their system would not be more than 170g. With the difference of under 5kg across the 28-seat cabin, and the cost implications of later change significantly higher given safety re-certification requirements, it is difficult to see why Qantas is not installing charging systems that adequately power today’s technology, let alone the obvious future where high-power USB 3 Type C systems are the norm.

“What we know now is that change is constant, and in three years’ time it will be really hard for us to define a definitive solution for that,” Qantas’ Capps said when Australian Aviation pressed the point. “What we’ve tried to do now is make the seat design as configurable as possible so that when new technology opportunities come up we can swap them in and out as simply as they can. What we haven’t done is design the current seat configuration for a specific future state, but we’ve designed it so that it is as configurable as possible. That means we should be able to swap as many parts as possible in and out as opportunities arise.”

In context, Qantas isn’t just competing against premium economy seats

In the age of an increasingly fragmented passenger experience market, it’s no longer an option simply to compare premium economy seats to other premium economy seats. AirAsia X is at the forefront of long-haul, low-cost carriers offering older business class products (currently an angled lie-flat seat) for somewhere between the cost of economy and premium economy, and the airline has plans to return to the European market as it takes delivery of newer, more efficient aircraft. Similarly, Southeast Asian and Chinese airlines are pricing their business class products aggressively, often below the price point of other airlines’ premium economy.

As an example, Qantas’ premium economy from Melbourne to London — which is the current A380 product via Dubai, so without any Perth transit premium — is currently pricing at over $4650 for a Sunday-to-Sunday return in August. In contrast, Vietnam Airlines’ fully flat business class with direct aisle access in an outward-facing herringbone Zodiac Cirrus configuration is over $300 cheaper than Qantas’ premium economy, even if it does come with an extra six-hour layover in Ho Chi Minh. Moreover, Vietnam’s premium economy, using the Boeing catalogue HAECO seat Scoot and others also selected, comes in at under $2500. It’s hard to argue that either corporate beancounters or upmarket leisure travellers will be convinced that Qantas’ premium economy is worth nearly double that.

SIDEBAR: An ultra-longhaul research partnership may prove key to a unique selling point

When Qantas decided to launch Perth-London, Phil Capps tells Australian Aviation, “What we didn’t want to do was extrapolate a Sydney-LA (somewhere around a fourteen-hour flight) and just put more white space between the existing services, and create a Perth-London for example. We were aware that, as the flight gets beyond seventeen hours, you’re almost approaching a whole human circadian rhythm, and we thought that means that we should really rebuild the onboard experience. We know a lot about flying from our own experience, but we are not physicians ourselves, so we wanted to reach out to what we know to be the world’s best in terms of not just things like sleep specialists, but those who look after sleep and airway management, people who are dieticians and nutritionists, people who are complex data modelling experts, people who are biomedical engineers as well, so that we could influence the entire flight experience but also the experience in the leadup to an ultra-longhaul flight and the experience at the other end.”

“In doing that,” Capps says, we thought we needed to talk to a university — they probably would have the best minds in the business.” Qantas chose Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre, a research hub focusing on holistic factors affecting human health.

Capps notes that the centre is “almost like a learning hub. It draws from specialists across the entire academic community to solve, at its core, human problems around things like nutrition, movement and cardiovascular health, but has all these applications or extension potential to environments such as ours. They’re helping us with parts of the cabin interior itself: temperature, lighting, lighting phases for example.”

“We’ve just participated in a lighting workshop with Boeing up in Seattle,” Capps explains. “They have a configurable system that they can develop in terms of settings for each airline. We want to make sure that we’re applying the right wavelengths of light to customers at the right parts of the flight to make sure that we’re really supporting the transition of the circadian rhythm to minimise as much as we can jetlag and maximise the sense of wellbeing.”

The university, Capps says, is “also helping work with with us on meal planning — both the recipes, collaborating with Neil Perry and Rockpool, and on what options you can give to customers to support everything from sleep to wakefulness to digestive comfort, as well as the sequencing of meals during the flight. Traditionally airlines will serve something straight after takeoff, on a longhaul flight some kind of refreshment halfway through or thereabouts, and something before landing. We don’t know whether that will be the case on our ultra-longhaul any more. We’re working through that at this point. But it could be that we resequence a lot of those things to make sure that we’re starting to get the body into a new rhythm rather than forcing customers to adapt.”

“We’re also working with them on our transit lounge in Perth, which will support flights that come in as an international sector from the east coast of Australia and then continue onwards to London. The environment that we build in there will have certain spaces that are also designed in collaboration with Sydney University to help the reset as well. There are various options there — we can’t disclose any of that yet, but certainly there are some dedicated spaces within that will be, we think, unique. Also, the food and beverage offering and configuration in those lounges will be unique, as will what we build into our London lounge as well, so it’s not just about the Perth transit, it’s about the lounge experiences at either end of those journeys as well.”