The passenger experience industry often considers plastics in aesthetic terms, from developing exciting new shapes, patterns and technologies to avoiding the ‘wall of beige’ in aircraft cabins, and everything in between. But as more and more of the plastics in other areas of our lives see developments around reducing their environmental footprint via using recycled plastics and bioplastics, what are the prospects for the cabin?
The answer is complicated. For a start, these aren’t single-use plastics, and despite their presence right in front of passengers’ noses, they’re not enormous by volume.
“While we do use some thermoplastics in our products for the aircraft cabin, the actual real estate taken up by thermoplastics is quite small,” Collins Aerospace spokesperson Joel Girdner explains to Runway Girl Network. “When we do use them, they are meant to last 20+ years and can be serviced. So they’re not considered the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) most people ass
Creating a new type of aircraft seating is incredibly difficult, with
aviation regulation lagging significantly behind both design innovations, materials engineering and best regulatory practice, and designers at the bleeding edge of what’s possible often ending up with metaphorical scarred fingers.
The
convertible recliner/flatbed Butterfly seat, a very promising option for future longhaul narrowbodies is no different. Chief commercial officer Lars Rinne tells Runway Girl Network around the RedCabin virtual conference that “we experienced some significant issues with the engineering of the seat’s core recline/flip mechanism. However, we finally mastered it and the mechanism is currently undergoing an actual cycle testing program in a test rig which we have built by ourselves for this purpose.”