When you’re flying coach, you may have no elbow room, and your knees
may be tightly pinned by the reclining seat in front of you, but at
least there’s nobody sitting on top of you.
That may be about to
change. If Airbus’ new patent progresses, you can say goodbye to all
that empty space above your head. The stacked seating arrangement,
called “mezzanine seating,” would have a small ladder or three
steps leading up between rows, where more seats are crammed in above the
main deck. The patent, which was filed October 1st, proposes that the
seats on both levels can be reclined to be flat or almost flat. The
design was greeted by plenty of scorn in the media, with many stories
describing it as “flying bunk beds,” “horrific” and “hellish”.
In the drawings accompanying the patent application, it appears that a
person seated upstairs has another person’s head just inches away,
directly under his (or hers) bum. Airbus tries to describe the seating
design in a positive light: “In order to still more efficiently use
the space in a passenger cabin aircraft (the patent) proposes to
position an elevated deck structure on a main deck floor in the
passenger cabin of a wide-body aircraft for providing a mezzanine
seating area in a substantially unused upper lobe of the aircraft
fuselage.”
