Tag Archives for seats.
American Airlines announced this morning that they’ll be moving to new business class suites with doors, putting more premium seats into planes, and eliminating their Flagship First Class product starting in 2024.
Installing doors on business class seats actually requires more than just FAA approval – the way nearly everything on a plane does. It requires an actual exemption from federal regulations that are in place banning doors inside passenger cabins.
There are no doors between coach and business class cabins, there are curtains, for a reason – facilitating evacuation of the aircraft. And doors on business class seats are… doors inside the passenger cabin.
A consumer group, Flyers Rights, is seeking to have the courts compel the FAA to impose minimum seat size standards. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard this argument today.
The only effect it could have is to outlaw the Frontier Airlines-Spirit Airlines business model and reduce price competition against American, United, Delta and Southwest.
Some passengers simply will not change seats when asked, and that is ok. One woman absolutely won’t change seats, unless it is a celebrity doing the asking. She insists on seat 8A on Virgin Atlantic, and will take a different flight if she cannot have it. And she absolutely won’t fly in a backwards-facing business class seat.
The woman reports that a father was furious when she wouldn’t switch seats so that family could sit together – wishing her “ill for the future” and “storm[ing] off.”
They’re considering putting doors on their narrowbody lie flat business class seats. And this seat would balance their desire for a top shelf product without taking up a lot of real estate on the plane – they could literally manage to offer less than 35 inches of pitch (distance from the same point on two seats) because of the angling of the seats even as they do just one seat on each side of the aisle since each seat turns into a bed facing outward at an angle from window to the aisle.
The seat would basically back up against the window. That means passengers would all ‘have’ windows but it wouldn’t be easy to look out the window. Instead their back would largely face the window with their feet facing the aisle. Seats would be positioned at an angle in a herringbone pattern. The Collins Aurora seat resembles the Thompson VantageSolo seat which JetBlue uses for their new Mint product.
Boeing is delivering 787s again and American Airlines has 25 of the 787-9 variant originally slated to start entering the fleet in 2023, but delayed. These 787-9s are exciting because American Airlines will debut a new business class seat with doors on this aircraft, and the plane will have more premium seats, and fewer seats overall.
How did I never know about this? I’ve been using SeatGuru for years, but I don’t find itearly as useful as it once was. It turns out there’s a much better source for airline seat maps.
A ‘LOPA’ is a Layout of Passenger Accommodations. It doesn’t just show seats. It’s a detailed schematic of the passenger cabin that’s drawn to scale. And there’s a site that has these for a number of airlines, both foreign and domestic.
Introducing the Thompson Vantage XL seat in 2016 was fantastic in 2016 when doors in business class was still a novelty. In 2022 it’s… okay, but something of an also-ran. The seat is tight. Not quite as tight as United’s Polaris, but certainly not spacious either. In terms of passenger space it compares unfavorably to American Airlines.
In spring 2019 Virgin Atlantic unveiled a new business class product that would debut on the airline’s new Airbus A350 aircraft. It was a leap forward compared to their existing seat, but hardly revolutionary, and lacked doors.
Now Virgin has unveiled yet another new business seat which will debut on Airbus A330s. They have 16 A330-900s on order, and 3 of them are expected to be delivered between September and the end of the year. With a narrower fuselage than he A350, their old new seat wouldn’t fit and they needed another.
American Airlines Platinum elites and higher now have access to extra legroom coach seats on Qatar Airways, complimentary at the time of booking, and Qatar Airways elites receive similar benefits on American.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
