Brad Ideas - Backwards airplane middle seats - Comments

Looks good

brad — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:10:40 -0700

I’m impressed they fit it in the standard pitch. One of the problems I had in trying to design a diagonal stagger like this was the squeeze between the outside corner of the window (most forward) seat and the rear inside corner of the seat in front — this will be narrower, and I wondered if you could get approval for how it might interfere with emergency exit. (After all, they are paranoid about how a reclined seat will interfere with getting out in an emergency.)

This approach misses one thing though. For those of us in the “widebody” category, and actually for everybody, you want room to spread your elbows. Part of my goal in getting away from the 3-in-a-row design was that it aligns us up so widest part of the body bumps into widest part. I would modify these seats so that there is a small hole at elbow level instead of a solid surface. This intrudes into the seat pocket area of the seat behind, but I would rather have somebody’s elbow taking my space there than somebody’s elbow/arm right at my elbow the way we do it now.

The padded lean-against curve is a nice touch I did not consider (as I switched to the alternating direction approach.)

Staggered seating on Delta

Sterling — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:43:05 -0700

Apparently Delta is going with a variation on your "middle seats ... about 6” behind the aisle and window seats" concept, except they're putting the aisle seat behind the middle seat instead, leading to a sort of "diagonal" row. From Wired.

Backwards airplane middle seats

brad — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:49:40 -0700

It’s annoying (and vidicating at the same time) when you see somebody else developing an idea you’re working on, and today I saw one such idea announced in Europe.

Last year while flying I mused about how sitting in a row makes us bump up against one another at the point we are all widest — the elbows and butts. We are not rectangles, so there are roomier ways to pack us. I toyed with a number of ideas.

First I considered staggering the rows slightly, either by angling them back or front a bit, or simply having the middle seats be about 6” behind the aisle and window seats. Then our elbows would not overlap, but it would make the “corridor” (if you can call it that) to the window seat have some narrow corners, and would suffer some of the problems I will outline below.

Then I realized it might make sense to just reverse the middle seat. All the middle seats in a section could face backwards, and we would then have more space because wide parts would mesh with narrow parts. Somebody else has also worked up the same idea and has even got some prototypes and drawings, which are better than the ones I had worked up to show here. However, I will outline some of the issues I came up with in my experiments — mostly done with household chairs laid out in experimental patterns.