Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2014. It reports news from that month: the AirGo seat was a design in development, and the diverted flight refers to a reclining-seat fight that month. It does not say whether the seat ever reached airlines.
Because of fierce competition between airlines, plane tickets keep getting cheaper, although the truth is that many low-cost airlines don’t offer economy passengers much comfort.
Some time ago we looked at a company with a curious and simple invention to give airline passengers more privacy on their flight (though it had a few gaps). This time, the company AirGo Design is working on seats that will avoid certain problems and make travellers more comfortable.
Last week, another flight had to be diverted because passengers were fighting: when one reclined, it bothered the passenger behind. Not to mention that the in-flight screen is often “embedded” in the seat in front, and if that passenger reclines too far, not only are your knees crushed, but you also partly lose sight of the screen.
AirGo is the first company to innovate with what will probably be the only airline seat in the world designed from real 3D scans of the human body, and, as the company’s images of the design showed, even when the seat in front is fully reclined, it doesn’t bother the passenger behind.
In addition, the module that holds the screen is adjustable, so it can be positioned to suit whatever posture we choose to travel in.
If this company succeeds and airlines like its seat design, AirGo will certainly be a company worth keeping an eye on, because it could enter a very profitable business: passenger disputes over seats are more common than people might imagine, and on several occasions there have been more serious incidents that forced planes to divert.
So investing in a solution to this problem could be worth considering for airlines.
There is still a lot to improve in commercial flights, and some entrepreneurs still have time to find a business opportunity in those improvements.
Featured image: Uploader.; derivative work: Altair78, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
