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Project Name: Essential

Date Completed: April 2018

Designer: In-house Design Team

Essential is the vision of a seat that improves the business class experience while dramatically reducing its complexity and weight. Business class seating has been improving steadily from being wider, more comfortable seats to becoming private suites where the seat can transform from a comfortable seat to a full flat bed. To achieve this, complexity, weight and cost have been steadily increasing. The drive behind Essential was to provide a comparable level of comfort without resorting to the use of a seat kinematic to solve the issue, but instead relying on the architecture of the seat to provide a suitable solution to both functions.

Essential achieves a full flat bed without the need for a complex seat mechanism, which frees space for the passenger, removes weight from the seat and eliminates the need to provide maintenance to the seat mechanism, reducing operating costs for the airlines. Essential improves the passenger experience by making a better use of the seat architecture. Since the seat does not recline into a bed, there’s no need to leave gaps for the seat motion, which increases the space available for the passenger while providing a better-quality bed surface as this surface again, will not move.

The knowledge of seating requirements, by designing a versatile seating space that can combine both an upright sitting position and a comfortable bed space in the same geometry. Since Essential provides a big improvement of in-seat storage, there’s no need to have bins in the business class cabin, therefore the smooth, comfortable surfaces that define Essential can extend towards the cabin design, creating a more open and inviting cabin.