To door or not to door

In the blue corner, it’s British Airways with the Super Diamond from Collins Aerospace, previously known as Rockwell Collins and still familiar to many as the heritage brand B/E Aerospace. This is the same basic seat that appears on Virgin Australia and numerous other airlines, but updated and branded in a very sober and serious BA business aesthetic.

In the red corner, Virgin Atlantic, with the Cirrus NG from Safran Seats, previously Zodiac Aerospace and before that Sicma, based on the seat best known from Cathay Pacific. Naturally, this one’s kitted out in the sexy glam red that the Virgin brand promises.

If BA’s seat is all business, Virgin’s is all class. But in the bones, these are remarkably similar seats, and both are the latest updated versions of products that have, in Cirrus’ case, been around for more than a decade since its début on the former US Airways.

There’s only one difference in layout: where BA’s seats all point away from their aisle, Virgin’s centre section has the seats pointing away from each other towards the aisle and windows rather than at each other. This is, the airline says, preferable because passengers travelling in pairs are closer together to talk and share the experience. It also minimises over-shoulder screen-watching in the centre seats.

But there’s one crucial difference: British Airways’ seat has a door, which slides forwards to cut off the passenger from the rest of the cabin. Virgin’s does not, with just a small sliding privacy divider a little akin to what is generally on offer between centre pairs of seats.

The key question is whether the lack of doors will be a deal breaker for passengers considering the two airlines, markedly different in branding but archrivals on many of their bread-and-butter routes.

Doors are, as a rule, tricky to fit on an aircraft. They’re thick, heavy, complex and require special certification, since there is, somewhat astoundingly, no set of airworthiness regulations under either the US FAA (for Boeing aircraft) or Europe’s EASA (for Airbus jets) permitting what the regulators call “doored mini-suites”. Instead, case-by-case assessments are made of how each seat and cabin combination measures up.

Largely, doors are essentially bolted on to existing product. That’s certainly the case with the BA Cirrus NG Delta ONE Suite, which is the same basic Thompson Vantage XL product as Qantas but with a door on it. The Qsuite, a bespoke creation for Qatar by Collins, would clearly work without a door. There are a few concept options of whizzbang James Bond-esque privacy screens, notably from Safran and Jamco, but none are yet flying.

Indeed, on medium-sized widebody aircraft such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A330 the smaller fuselage width means that doors are particularly complicated. It’s even tricker on a 767, where Delta Air Lines, despite huge marketing success with its suite, has decided to install a similar family of product from its long-time seatmaker Thompson Aero Seating of Northern Ireland (now owned by China’s AVIC), but without doors.

So, is the business class passenger inherently an extrovert or introvert? Do they want time away to recharge or a stimulating social experience?

At the launch of the Virgin seat at the airline’s customer experience headquarters south of London, your author lost track of the number of times executives used the line that Virgin is an inherently social airline whose brand revolves around love and service and interactions with its crew. Indeed, it pioneered the modern inflight bar, which is now evolving into a lounge space.

But why can’t the answer to the introvert-or-extrovert question be “both”? There’s an easy option for passengers in doored seats who want to be sociable and interact: leave the door open, visit the bar, go chat with the crew in the galley. The option for passengers who need alone-time to recharge, relax, work or just sit quietly — and what a luxury that is in our modern times — is much more complicated if there’s not a door.

‘Doors are, as a rule, tricky to fit on an aircraft. They are thick, heavy and complex’