Sugarcane cabins and floating seats: The future of aircraft design

In The Independent’s travel trends column, Trendwatch, we dig into the types of trip, modes of transport and top buzzwords to watch out for.

Plane cabins are ever-changing, particularly in the long-haul world. In the past few months alone we’ve seen Air New Zealand unveil its first lie-flat beds for economy passengers – a series of bookable bunk-beds towards the back of the cabin known as the “Skynest”, which can be reserved for a mile-high nap during a chunk of the flight. Finnair has rethought the traditional business class seat with a new wide-backed “lounge” chair, which gives you more room to move around, yet still lie flat.

Meanwhile, Virgin Atlantic unveiled a new A330neo cabin, with its most luxurious Upper Class seat yet, the Retreat Suite. This enables business passengers seated at the front of the Upper cabin to turn their comfy, lie-flat seats into a snug, sociable booth for up to four passengers to dine or take a meeting together. Virgin is also prioritising bigger entertainment screens, wireless device-charging pads and Bluetooth functionality to keep pace with consumer trends.

But what other big moves are being made towards a smarter, safer or comfier cabin?

Here are some of the most recent innovations on their way to a plane near you:

Bluetooth-equipped entertainment

In some ways, it’s mad that this seemingly universal technology is just coming to inflight entertainment (IFE) systems. As David Kondo, head of customer experience product design for Finnair, points out: “The infrastructure for digital stuff onboard is just so lagged – you know, we’ve just figured out how to do Bluetooth headphones.” Virgin’s new A330-800neos will be equipped with seatback screens you can connect to your own earbuds, Qatar’s Dreamliners already have the functionality and United Airlines has it on some flights. Kondo predicts more of this “interacting with your own device”, such as being able to log into your own streaming services.

Techy passenger checks

The “internet of things” is coming to your plane seat. Namely, the seatbelts: “smart” belts were spotted at the 2022 Aircraft Interiors Expo, able to tip off the cabin crew as to who’s buckled up and who isn’t, saving the manual walk-through to check. TAP Portugal went even further in 2019, trialling a whole “smart seat” by tech manufacturer Recaro, which fed back passenger behaviour and data to the crew – they can see who is standing upright when they shouldn’t…