Latest Airbus single aisle aircraft innovations
airbus.com
airbus.com
- "seats measure up to 18-inches wide in economy, the same standard configuration found on Airbus widebody aircraft"
- "To minimise cabin pressure effects on the body, the cabin maintains a 6,000-feet average altitude pressure, roughly equivalent to that of a mountain ski town. This is the same cabin pressure as the modern A350 widebody, and it helps to reduce physical fatigue, headaches and jet lag."
- "Modern next-generation LED lighting systems aboard the A321XLR gently transition through customised hues, mimicking natural sunrises and sunsets to help reset the body’s circadian rhythm. Temperature control is split into three actively controlled zones, and airlines can even opt for heated floor panels to give passengers an extra touch of cozy luxury. Last but not least, advanced acoustic technologies have been integrated through the aircraft’s frame to minimise engine noise, resulting in a 50% noise footprint reduction compared to previous-generation single-aisle aircraft."
Weird. My general approach is to switch to destination time as soon as I am seated and then act like I am in the destination timezone. Sleep as best I can if it is night at the destination and force myself awake if it is still day time. Seems much easier to synchronize that way.
The LEDs might work well though if they have been designed to do the job.
* full customers are easier to deal with than hungry customers
* Doing meal service early avoids the risk that weather turns rough, making a late meal service hard/impossible.
* Crews are fresher earlier in the flight, and so are do a better job and prefer doing meals early.
* Waking customers up is extra work for crews, and may not be wanted by passengers.
Weird, must be airline specific? All the intercontinental flights I've taken recently follows a "take-off -> food -> dark -> food -> landing" schedule, regardless of what time it is outside.
Sadly the Virgin arrivals lounge closes by the time you get through immigration and baggage collection, so you'll need to grab a bite to eat, but it's not the end of the world. I can usually average 6-8 hours of decent enough sleep doing that.
Like you, one can always ignore them - I’ve missed many a dinner and breakfast by sleeping through them on a flight back to Europe.
Amazingly, it has a "typical range" of 8,700 km. That is crazy for a single aisle aircraft. That potentially means flights of up to 10 hours at cruise speed around 833 km/h. I think most people would feel incredibly cramped in a single aisle aircraft for that long.
I also found a list of the longest scheduled commercial flights with this aircraft: https://simpleflying.com/over-8-hours-30-minutes-the-worlds-...
The longest is Madrid (Spain) to Washington, D.C. (USA) at 9h 40m. Yikes.
The pairings look similar to 787/A350 (point to point for non-hub cities), only the city pairs are even smaller.
In a typical single aisle airplane, sitting in coach, you're expected to use the restroom "in your cabin" which is at the rear. If you're sitting anywhere _except_ the rear, your access to the restroom will be blocked for a significant portion of shorter flights by food/bev carts.
By contrast, on a widebody, there are restrooms front and rear. If your access to one is blocked, you can go the other way, and you can _also_ use the front or rear to access the _other_ aisle. It's the difference between feeling totally confined versus freedom to move about (other than having to hassle any passengers between yourself and the aisle).
I admit, with limited cabin service in economy, on a longer flight, the blocked aisle isn't such an issue -- but on the typical 1.5-3h narrowbody flight, the food/bev service does seem to be a significant obstruction.
I'm someone who would happily pay up for a lie-flat more frequently if it was priced at 2-3x a regular ticket rather than 5x+. Airlines are slowly expanding premium cabins, and I'd be hopeful that narrowbodies like this permit further growth, but the demand seems to be increasing faster than the supply, so the prices are still crazy.
If you look at pictures it seems like the lie-flat seats take up roughly 6x the space of what the economy seats take up.
> I'm someone who would happily pay up for a lie-flat more frequently if it was priced at 2-3x a regular ticket rather than 5x+.
Air travel seems like this as most airlines and manufacturers seem to bend over backwards for their wealthy and high margin passengers and basically treat economy class as "fine I guess we'll throw the rest of you in the back"
Mobile games seem the apotheosis of this as a lot of games are really about finding whales and any enjoyment anyone else has is really an accidental side effect.
You can tell they keep removing space to fit more bodies in at all costs because they don't even try to line up seats with windows anymore. Multiple seats had windows in places that made them basically useless and one seat from what I could tell had two windows just due to the placement.
Don't even get me started on the cart that goes up the aisle handing out dry cookies to everyone followed by the person with a trash bag coming along to gather it from you.
I had school buses as a kid that were more comfortable and the people better behaved.
It's also worth remembering that there are various premium options available. You can pay extra for economy plus or really splurge on business/first. "That's too expensive" OK well you made your choice....
> " OK well you made your choice...."
The only choice for most people is "fly cheap" or "don't go".
And while the names are confusingly similar, Economy Plus is usually a seat with extra legroom (but no additional width) and is a small price bump, but Premium Economy is a larger wider seat with generous recline (but not lay-flat), and is a large price increase, sometimes approaching business class pricing.
"Premium economy" on an international long haul flight is often the same (or very similar) seat as "first class" on a domestic flight.
I've recently been blessed with being able to afford flying on lie-flat seats (international business class). That said, I've found what you are calling "economy plus" to be the sweet spot.
You get slightly more leg room, but also priority boarding so that you don't have to worry about getting your bag gatechecked. It's also only slightly more expensive than main cabin regular economy.
"Premium economy" is significantly more expensive, and while you do get a bigger seat, it's not lie-flat. You can recline more, but the few times I've flown it, you are still able to piss off the passenger behind you when you recline with all the shenanigans that can entail. Thus I find it not worth the premium.
I have a lot of complaints about products and services that I can chalk up to various market failures or sinister actors, but poor airline experience is entirely on us, the consumer. Our revealed preference is for the lowest possible ticket price all else be damned.
In any case, I don’t actually agree with you. The advent of Basic Economy as a category shows that. I always wanted an ultra cheap category in the US when I was young and now it exists. That category is valuable to the kind of person who is aiming simply to be transported from one place to another and can withstand discomfort.
Overall, I really like air travel in the US. There’s a straightforward sliding scale of comfort and price and you pick where you want to be on it. Flights are available often and easily. The prices also seem to align with things that would cost airlines and because they surge prices etc they’re able to balance availability and accessibility.
European air travel is also good with many options but I don’t have much experience with it recently. And of course the E Asian airlines are good. I don’t mind a classic Cathay but a Starlux plane is very nice even in Economy.
As someone who has flown every class available and routinely selects based on what and with whom I’m traveling, I think air travel today is more accessible and nicer than ever before.
> I don’t mind a classic Cathay but a Starlux plane is very nice even in Economy.
You got it backwards. If economy passengers preferred better services to cheaper fare, they would have chosen airlines with better services, and airlines would have to adapt accordingly, offering better and more expensive services.
They can't, because when it comes to their wallets, passengers don't actually prefer that, whatever they say online.
Business/first class passengers are a minority group who say "Fuck it, I have money, I want to be treated like I have money." So of course airlines offer them better service - at a much higher price.
It's not quite that simple. Unless you fly a lot, it's hard to know about service differences between two airlines -- which has better air quality, more efficient disembarking, fewer recitals of the credit card pitch, etc. Passengers have to make their choices based on the subset of their preferences that they can actually compare, which is a pretty small subset.
Not that price isn't very important! But if I make my decision based on just (schedule, price, luggage policy, seat pitch, seat location), it's because that's all the info I've got.
> Business/first class passengers are a minority group who say "Fuck it, I have money, I want to be treated like I have money."
19th century French polymath (economist, engineer, bureaucrat) Jules Dupuit famously described this concerning railway carriage accomodations and the parlous state of third-class carriages:
It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.
Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.
<https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...>
More on Dupuit:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Dupuit>
You'll find similar examples in digital / software goods, where product differentiation (and price discrimination) are often achieved by producing otherwise identical goods, and then selectively disabling features in the lower-priced variants. Microsoft Windows NT server vs. workstation was one early notorious example, though IBM also apparently included No-OP loops in servers which could be disabled for higher performance. See: <https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html>.
(I've ... mentioned Dupuit previously: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.)
So it's a race to the bottom. Airlines are famously low-margin businesses, so they really have no choice but to save as much money as they can by continually pushing the envelope on what depravities passengers will accept. And as they keep pushing, people complain, but they still eat it up and love the lower prices.
If economy class passengers would actually pay for perks and a nicer experience, the airlines would provide it. And sometimes they kinda-sorta do, via economy plus, premium economy, and similar (whatever the particular airline chooses to call it). But, by and large, people just care about the lowest price, so many planes don't even have mid-range service options, and some airlines don't even offer them at all.
Return was on their A330, which was noticeable worse in every way EXCEPT it's 2-4-2 seatings, so we had a pair of outside seats to ourselves, where on the A321, it's 3-3, so you have a neighbor in the window seat.
I fail to see what's innovative about "we shoved business class seats into a narrow-body aircraft".
An A321 is still an A321.
Flying internationally in a single-aisle aircraft is under any circumstances torture no matter how you sugar coat it: "Come fly in our modern, innovative sardine can."
By the way BA did this years ago with their London City A318 which doesn't exist anymore because it was a failure that merely burned money.
Apropos of anything else, and leaving aside intensity, almost all of the research into blue light and sleep points to it having nearly no effect. Maybe less surprising when one of the earlier corporate proponents of this was Luxottica who just saw another opportunity to make money.
At this point, the designers of narrow-body interiors should be actively shamed for how hostile they have made lavatory designs. In a world in which every major flying population is aging and more overweight, yet every generation of airplane lavatories is even narrower and less accessible for everyone.
I suspect in time there will actually be safety consequences to the continued downsizing of airplane lavatories. There are already a number of serious incidents that have been caused by fluid leaks from galleys and lavatories (IIRC Quantas came pretty close to losing a 747-400 due to a kitchen leak leading to massive water intrusion into the main electrical/avionics bay - once you end up pouring large quantities of water on your avionics all bets are off about the systems failures that will happen and you are well beyond any backup/redundancy that has been designed in, and during the 60s and 70s the USAF experienced serious corrosion of flight control cables on C-130s due to urine "leakage"). Too-small lavatories basically guarantee that water and urine are going to end up in undesirable locations and at best they will cause expensive interior corrosion and at worst they will cause serious corrosion to the airframe or critical equipment.
... for a cost.
I really think parents putting their kids in first class does them a disservice. And on top of that, if they're at all disruptive, that's incredibly rude to other first class passengers who have paid quite a bit of money for a better experience.
I always think of the early scene in the movie Home Alone when Catherine O'Hara's character asks her husband if they should feel bad about the kids flying coach while they're in business, and he assures her that the kids are fine. That's the right way to do it!
(Before the inevitable "but!"s, yes, I know that won't work super well if you just have one kid traveling with you; it's understandable that you might not feel comfortable with them sitting alone. And of course they need to be of a certain age, or have old enough siblings, to be on their own in that situation. But that's not an excuse to bring your kids up to first or business class. You should be flying with them in economy if they can't sit there on their own.)
Just because you didn't have money to fly, now you don't want other kids to have that? Lol wat?
jfyi, I didn't have any money to fly either. Now flying business with kids. Hope to see you there someday :)
What is so bad about having your child sit in front or in back of you? To the side might be a bit difficult as you need to reach across the aisle.
How far do you want to take this? :)
If you didn't mean literally $5 perhaps you can give us some real examples of cost differences?
Personally I find so little difference between airlines in economy these days. And Premium Economy is nowhere close to a '$5' difference long haul these days
Also, the business class staff are so nice, they make you feel like a million bucks.
To the back of the plane, all you poor people!
It feels like the same phenomenon when people bitched and moaned about having to take even the slightest COVID precautions.
For short flights I will just tuck my legs awkwardly when necessary and have to get up to stretch regularly.
In other words, you are inconsiderate.
If you're tall, pay for economy plus or premium economy. If that's not offered on your route, that sucks, but getting pissed that someone will use their allowed recline space isn't fair of you.
If you want to get mad, get mad at all passengers collectively for treating ticket cost as their only criterion when booking flights.
Sometimes the seat design is such that my knees block the recline. If I'm unlucky it sucks.
To be fair, I have actually once seen someone not recline, but they had four or five visits from cabin crew before the lights went off making sure they were okay, or if they wanted to be moved, or if there was a fault with their seat. Like, even the crew thought it was an unusual occurrence.
Yet every thread that touches on this on HN, there are people saying "I never recline, what about the person behind me?". And then they complain about being uncomfortable!
There are definitely airline seats where the reclining seats impact the knee room. I'm 6'2" but I seem to have more of it in the legs than typical, which really shows up in non-extended legroom airlines. I buy the upgrade whenever possible, but sometimes it's just not available.
In a regular (not extended) seat, I have two positions that work: my ankles crossed and tucked up close to my seat with knees spread, and nothing in the underseat in front of me and then putting my feet there, with my legs straightened (wedging my thighs into the edge of my seat). Even then, my knees are high enough that usually the person in front of me reclining will recline the seat back into my knees (best case) or those metal side rails into my knees. Especially enjoyable when the suddenly recline the seat.
Not everyones body geometry is the same. My son is around the same height as me, but when we sit in the car he's like half a head taller than me, he carries a lot of his height in his trunk where I carry it in my legs.
It is more difficult to use a laptop on a tray table if the person in front of you is reclining; you often end up having to angle the screen down to the point where it's not great. In that case I often have to ditch the tray table and put it on my lap, which is less comfortable, but at least lets me angle the screen how I prefer.
Car seats are a lot heavier than airplane seats.
1) The windows are disappointing. This is, I think, due to the fatigue caused by large rectangular windows that previously caused a disaster but it begs for improvement. A way to make large windows or get rid of all the windows and use very high definition screens to imitate windows with live footage would be nicer
2) Noise is still a problem. I am sure they are trying hard, even the engines are designed around addressing the noise issue but it would be a huge improvement to have this solved. ANC maybe?
3) Automate the pilot out. This is I believe an area where plane makers are pioneers but we still got pilots, I would love to see flying with a plane becoming about the same as taking an elevator.
IMHO travel times are reasonable, the improvements in comfort, cost and practicality are due. Airports themselves too are due for an overhaul, it shouldn't be taking hours to get on a travel machine.
Overall, facilities that handle millions of people tend to have a lot of "standing in line" and the slightest disruptions can mean you'll be standing in line for an extra hour.
That's a complete non-starter for now and the next decades. Fully automated operation for 1-dimensional transport (trains) is a solved issue, for 2D, not so much and most certainly not for 3D.
Even though modern planes are very reliable, too many things can go wrong during flight to leave it to a machine - and for what? Just for bragging rights?