A seat with a long-range view
At the 2019 Paris Air Show, Airbus announced the launch of the A321 XLR – the extra long-range version of its iconic single-aisle twinjet. This extension of the traditional single-aisle market was an excellent opportunity for Safran Seats, and Airbus chose the company’s Vue (“View”) business class seats, purpose-designed for long-range single-aisle jets.
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In particular, these long-range single-aisles enable airlines to test new destinations and open “longer, thinner” routes.
hile the Airbus A321 XLR isn’t the first long-range single-aisle jet, this new version is reenergizing a market that reached its previous apogee with the Boeing 757, out of production since 2005. The A321 XLR offers an optimized tradeoff between range and passenger capacity, a winning equation that has spurred airlines to place over 450 orders already. In particular, these long-range single-aisles enable airlines to test new destinations and open “longer, thinner” routes.
According to Jean-Christophe Gaudeau, Executive Vice President for Marketing at Safran Seats, “With the emergence of these new airplanes, passengers want the same comfort as on a widebody jet. The seats available today can’t fulfill this need because of their size and/or weight, which means a new generation of seats had to be developed – and that’s where Safran Seats came in!”
Challenge Sapiens: a rich source of innovation
The aim of Safran Seats’ Challenge Sapiens is for staff to propose an innovative solution on a given topic. The competing teams come from different job fields – engineering, design, R&D, engineering, sales & marketing – and are often international. In addition to the winner of the 2019 contest, which led to the new Vue seat, two concepts from the 2018 Challenge were showcased at the AIX Hamburg interiors show, and subsequently sold to airlines.
A business class cabin with Vue seats, largely on a par with widebody business class cabin standards.
IN-HOUSE CONTEST WINNER!
In 2018, Safran Seats kicked off an annual in-house innovation contest, dubbed Challenge Sapiens, inspired by methods in the auto industry. The challenge for 2019 was to work on a type of seat dedicated to long-range single-aisle jets. Teams had to offer seat concepts featuring a lie-flat bed and direct access to the aisle, while meeting seating density objectives. They had to come up with innovative solutions in terms of layout, comfort and the passenger experience. About fifty projects were submitted, and the four finalists proceeded to the construction of wood mockups. “Vue won the 2019 contest because of its unrivaled passenger experience,” explains Quentin Munier, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Innovation at Safran Seats. “It ensures the same experience for each passenger, facing the window and back to the aisle, the ideal combination of space and privacy.”
THE ABCs OF VUE
The Vue seat is based on ABC, a modular seat platform that shares its armrest and tray mechanisms with other first and business class seats, like Versa and Unity. Offering unprecedented comfort, this seat can also incorporate options such as a door or headset-free in-flight entertainment to enhance passengers’ freedom of movement. Since the Challenge Sapiens winner was announced in 2019, development teams have worked without letup to mature the project. The announced specs won over aircraft manufacturers, and a European airline acknowledged the seat as the lightest in its class. All of these efforts culminated in 2021 with signatures of the first two contracts: one for the A321 XLR and the another for a long-range version of the Boeing 737 MAX. This success clearly reflects the productive innovation initiative at Safran Seats, coupled with a good understanding of the market and the advantages of the company’s industrial transformation. The first Vue seats should hit the market by 2023.
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