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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

The bunk bed concept often surfaces but see https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/21713/4188

Yeah I know... I have impractical ideas about air travel. My other idea was to take the second level of a 747 and convert it to a gym. Instead of seats you’d have treadmills and at the far end would be showers. Anyone could “book” time in the gym for a fee. Imagine being able to go for a run on a 18 hour transpacific flight? Of course all this gets mooted by the starship... once we can get la to Singapore in 20 minutes who cares what the seat looks like?

I don't get why you're downvoted. I think it's a creative idea. But I don't think it will fly (pun intended).

Real estate (as in space) on a plane is probably the most expensive in the world. While airlines reserve space for (for example) a bar in business class (and to the best of my knowledge only in the A380) a gym would use too much space.

There's also the issue with turbulence to consider, which would make a gym (at least without significant adaptions to the machines) rather impractical.

Real estate and weight are the two most expensive things on planes, and two things gyms use extensively.

True; I didn't even consider the weight.

Well, originally, the upper deck of 747s was a lounge/bar. Which personally appeals to me a lot more than a gym does to be honest. :-)

Given the huge improvements in air travel safety over the past few decades, it probably makes sense to relax evacuation and seatbelt requirements a little bit in order to enable experimentation with bunks and other non-standard layouts.

I still think there's the issue with business - and first class travelers, which pay top $ to lie flat on long haul flights and are main revenue source of most airlines.

Offering a cheap (or at least significantly cheaper) option to lie flat would eat into their own revenue.

Well, and once you have lie-flat seating, I'm not sure how different that is from regular business class. Sure you could still maybe squeeze a few more seats in and offer cheaper food/booze. But the difference in the cost to the airline is probably going to be pretty slim.

I would pay a bit extra to have 30 minute's worth of 'horizontal time' in a small bunk for flights over 10 hours in duration. However I assume that because this isn't a thing already, someone else thought of it, did the calculations and worked out it wouldn't be profitable for the airline.

What are you going to do with 30 mins? Power nap?

Few people can manage that

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