Acro-batics

In a remarkable positive note for the passenger experience, the space savings from the seat engineering will be passed directly on to passengers, Air New Zealand’s head of aircraft programmes Kerry Reeves explains to Australian Aviation as we sit in a trio of the new seats in the co-branded Acro-Air New Zealand section of the seatmaker’s stand at AIX.

Acro chief executive officer Chris Brady is something of a philosophical stickler on the way his company designs seats. “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, ‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. This epitomises our approach and determination to get to the essence of what we mean when we say ‘a comfortable seat’,” Brady says.

Gaining knowledge from by the barebones Series 3 — used on a variety of low-cost and leisure operations from A320 family stalwarts ultra-LCCs Spirit and Frontier in the US, Hawaiian Airlines’ short hop Boeing 717 interisland fleet, KLM’s Fokker aircraft, UK leisure carrier Jet2’s Boeing 737 and 757 fleet, and others — has been beneficial to Acro.

But while the philosophy has remained the same, the seat mechanics, manufacturing techniques and production capabilities have expanded markedly.

Indeed, the seat is so advanced that “we had to fast track our development and refinement process by working seamlessly across two opposing time zones,” Brady explains. “To do this, we set up two identical development rigs, one at Acro’s Gatwick facilities, one in Auckland. This allowed our teams to create, test and send through learnings while the other team slept: Acro’s design team building on and being challenged by Air New Zealand’s aviation engineering experts, improving the quality of design decisions and engineering solutions while giving us continuous 24-hour progress, effectively halving the lead time.”

The Series 6 seat is certainly a stunner. In an entirely appropriate All Black all black leather, it makes the most of the A320 family’s wider cabin cross-section, providing 18” on aisle and window seats, while carving an extra inch and a half out for the middle seat — without, Australian Aviation’s tape measure confirmed, any shenanigans around ultra-narrow armrests, although they are indeed more elbow-rests than previous generations. There’s even a centimetre or so of extra width on the seat cushion compared with the current A320 family seat.

The seat has performed exceedingly well in trials, Reeves says, which is borne out by the frankly rapturous reception it received from the usually tough passenger experience crowd at the Aircraft Interiors Expo.

“During our customer testing what we found with this seat is that comfort levels actually increased over time, versus the competitors’ decreased over time,” Reeves says. “That’s a really interesting perspective on how you achieve comfort. Most of that is driven around not providing softer cushions and that sort of thing: it’s about providing flexibility of space.”

Flexibility is something of an Acro signature, with Brady keeping an incredibly consistent line over the last few years that the most comfortable position for a passenger is the next position that they can take. Human bodies, Brady says, are comfortable when they have ways to move.

Within the cabin, “we are staying with the majority of 30 inches,” Reeves says. “We may always have slight variations as you lay out an aircraft. But that’s the proposition that we put on this aircraft. As you can see, 30 inches here is very, very spacious.”

Indeed, the difference was remarkable: even your 1m90 journalist found the seat roomy at knee level, and almost astonishingly so compared with the 30” of pitch on British Airways’ B/E Aerospace (now Rockwell Collins Interior Systems) Pinnacle seat on which Australian Aviation travelled to Hamburg. Passenger perception of pitch in this new generation of seats is continuing to evolve, and Air New Zealand is right on trend here (see Cabin Pressure, this issue).

Reeves also confirmed that Space+ extra-legroom rows would be installed towards the front of the aircraft, and in a roughly similar proportion to what is currently offered, although Air New Zealand “haven’t finalized that yet: we are still figuring out the configuration,” Reeves noted.

In terms of inflight entertainment on the nine-inch seatback screens, Reeves says the new seat “has the current specification of IFE monitor from Panasonic. The core system on the aircraft is called eX1 but it’s actually equivalent to longhaul eX3, the same proposition.”

Inseat power, in the form of a 110V AC outlet and a high-power USB socket, will be offered at the front spar of the seat, while a half-ampere USB socket will also sit in the monitor.

Recline for the seat will be controlled by a small lever at seat-pan level instead of the usual button in the armrest. “We wanted something that felt more ergonomic and felt more natural, without compromising the aesthetics and the design simplicity of the armrest,” Reeves says. “We felt there was a better way of achieving recline. And so we worked really hard with Acro to deliver something. It is quite a substantial movement from the Acro Series 3 seat, which is a very simple way of reclining. But we felt that we needed something that’s more appropriate for premium seats. It has worked really, really well, but not something that’s ever been seen before on a seat, so it’s quite new.”

Air New Zealand is currently considering what education passengers might need on how to use the new recline feature, Reeves says. “We will see how it goes. We could do PAs, we could indicate more signage, but we believe it actually is visual enough now that people will get it quite quickly.”

Elsewhere in the cabin, “we’ve gone for pivoting bins, which is a new feature for Airbus,” Reeves notes. “Along with the architecture of the aircraft, we specifically designed the seat aesthetics and layouts to match what we believe the new architecture will look like in the aircraft.”

The seat’s development has been remarkably swift for the aviation industry, not known for its speed to market. “Air New Zealand came on board just less than a year ago and immeasurably improved the seat with their determination to put the passenger at the centre of the design,” Brady says.

“We started talking about sales of Series 6 about 2 years ago,” Brady explains. “You may remember we came to this show last year with half our prototype. Initially it was a backrest: how are we going to simplify the construction of our Series 3 backrest and amplify its comfort characteristics, the curve and the knee space.”

“We realized,” Brady says, “that there is a ‘shadow gap’ with the Series 3 seat, which is wasted space. We recognized if we could return that surface back a couple of inches, and push the structure forward, we will have generated another half an inch of legroom and it would be prettier.”

Moreover, Brady notes, “it would appear wider — and comfort is found in people, not in seats, so if you think it’s wider, it is wider.”

As the seatback concept continued to grow, Brady explains, “we threw the whole seat away. There are a few dull, if you like, issues with the Series 3. It’s designed for the assembly and relies on a couple of processes that have by their nature wide tolerances, which creates the odd problem in production. It’s just a supply chain management thing.”

“We decided to come up with the Series 6 seat, which would be enabled by this composite technology. It would sort out all of our production issues and it would be the chance, with the resources that Acro has, to invest in some really considered product, approaching it as a product from an industrial design perspective.”

“Initially, with this enabling technology we can make sure that we deliver to the passenger really grown-up, high-quality features and stop looking like a caravan,” Brady quips. For Series 3, “the vacuum form is the feature: it’s low tech, low volume, bonded, glue-lined, beads everywhere, blunt edges, it can’t form a tight edge, can’t get a crisp detail, one thickness everywhere. It limits your capacity. So we must get into injection moldings and they’re expensive to make one of. The first one is £60,000, the second one is £6. When you are a startup, you simply can’t consider putting half a million pounds of tooling down — we can now, and we are going to approach the project with that vision. We are not going to allow any vacuum form into the seat because we are trying to achieve this higher purpose and want to talk to the tier one carriage because we believe our philosophy, comfort, robust, maintainable and a lightweight is a business strategy.”

“And the reason it’s a business strategy,” Brady concludes, “is that we’re all low-cost carriers now. You can’t compete on price in the long term because you just disrupt the market for a while and then the economics shift.”

“Carolyn McCall [of easyJet] realised it at first and then [Ryanair CEO Michael] O’Leary realised it, that you have to compete on service,” Brady says.” So the long term play is not about lightweight seats, it’s about seats that are lightweight. Comfort first, service first. So we try to build a business that has the capability and the capacity to deliver what you want as a customer that meets your comfort, robustness, and technical goals.”

When Acro talked to Air New Zealand, Brady says, “We gave them that pitch pretty much here. They said, ‘hey, that’s what we think’, and they pretty much pitched it back to me. It’s about comfort, robustness, maintainability. It’s a business solution, it’s not an item that’s been procured that I can give a price and a weight to on a spreadsheet. We’re solving a business problem. And they were — they are — experienced innovators. They are measured risk takers and they know how to control risk in a way that you’re not even being surprised.”

The seat, and the new aircraft, will serve Air New Zealand’s existing routes, Reeves notes. “Our route structure will remain pretty similar to the current network for those aircraft: Tasman and Pacific flying. But what it will do with the new engine options, is allow us to be much less payload restricted, especially when we have weather in the Pacific, which sometimes is an issue for us.”