Plane manufacturer Airbus has applied to patent mezzanine airplane seating that would stack passengers on leading of 1 yet another.
According to the document – filed by the aeronautics giant’s Hamburg headquarters and published by the European Patent Workplace – the seating would comprise “at least one particular 1st seat organized at a first lower level, and at least one 2nd seat arranged at a second elevated degree”.
The added mezzanine level of seating could be put in down the central part of the plane, to get advantage of what the Airbus patent refers to as “a considerably unused upper lobe of the aircraft fuselage”.
Diagrams show the upper level getting accessed by stairs or ladders attached to the side of the seating.
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The two levels of seats would be capable of getting reclined, and the patent document involves drawings that show a variety of choices for fitting completely horizontal seats into the offered area without having compromising on reduce degree passengers’ headroom.
Other illustrations present option arrangements of seating, such as a single the place the upper degree of passengers could face the opposite way to the passengers beneath.
Even though the layout has been proposed for an airplane, the patent also suggests that it could apply to other modes of transport this kind of as buses and trains.
Airbus told British newspaper The Telegraph that the patent is just one particular of several hundred filed every single year, and there was no promise it would be adopted into present aircraft styles.
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It truly is not the initial patent for unusual seating filed by the plane manufacturer: diagrams of chairs that would substitute seat cushions for bicycle-fashion saddles emerged in 2014.
A far more luxurious proposal from Airbus involved a conceptual airplane with a transparent cabin and virtual golf course, which would supply passengers shape-shifting seats, aromatherapy and antioxidant-enriched air.
To coincide with the London 2012 Paralympics, transport design studio Priestmangoode created a conceptual airline seat with a detachable wheelchair that clipped back into a fixed seat frame when required as a standard aisle seat.
