Cranky Flier has the details on the new planned US Airways business class seat. It’s not best in class, but is certainly appears to be a huge improvement.

It’ll be installed on the A330-200s over the next year (we’ll see if they keep to that schedule). The 767s will never get a retrofit, we’ll see when those get retired. And the A330-300s will get a slightly different seat, at some point, when they figure out what that means they’ll tell us. And the seat on the A330-200 will apparently not even be quite unform

Now that picture above doesn’t look completely flat to me, but according to US Airways, the seat will go down into a 6′4″ or 6′8″ 180 degree flat bed depending upon which seat you have in the cabin. The seat width is 20.5″ with the armrests up, but when they go down, the width is 25″ for sleeping.

So much for commonality.

But even a 10-year old angled-flat seat would be better than what they have now, so can’t complain.

They’ll do fewer seats in the cabin, which means greater difficultiy with upgrades and awards. But I currently would avoid US Airways transatlantic anyway, whereas I can imagine taking them in a pinch once the retrofit is widespread enough that I’d be comfortable getting this seat rather than their old one…