Safe & sound

Design, certification and manufacturing create high-tech airline cabin challenges

Sit down in your airliner seat, buckle up, and contemplate the seat back in front of you. Over decades, and at a cost second only to the price of the airframe itself, that seat has been engineered to ever-stricter standards to save your life several times over. So has everything attached to it, as well as the bins, bulkheads, sidewalls and ceiling of the cabin. And it’s all made of brand-new, high-technology materials.

The cabin’s importance to commercial aviation, and the cost of creating and manufacturing new seats and interiors, is even driving the size and shape of future airliners, in a change to the outside-in model used since the dawn of the industry.