As air travel becomes cheaper, aircraft manufacturers are devising newer ways to accommodate more and more people in airplanes.
Even as the size of the seats continue to shrink, European airplane manufacturer Airbus is looking to take things a step further as its new patent suggests.
You could potentially be looking at mezzanine seating inside the cabin of aircrafts, which will create the effect of passengers being stacked on top of each other.
The patent application shows designs that propose a second layer of seats, which will be aligned over those in the middle row. The diagram shows stairs that will give access to the second-layer seats.
While the idea of this design is to squeeze in more people onto the aircraft and offer comfort with the option of completely reclining chairs, the awkward designing defeats the purpose completely. Trading-in more leg room for claustrophobia?
"In modern means of transport, in particular in aircraft, it is very important from an economic point of view to make optimum use of the available space in a passenger cabin," notes Airbus in the patent application.
There are 12 sketches which depict the seemingly acrobatic-looking designs and one of them shows passengers potentially seated face-to-face on elevated chairs. For leg room one would be sacrificing face room if the atrocious design were to see the light of day.
The patent design seem to suggest that Airbus is bracing passengers for an ordeal by negating the joys of travel. It seems the company forgot the travel anxieties people can face, especially on long-haul flights. Torturing passengers with the bizarre seating arrangements seems to be the motto of the patent designs.
Airbus, however, tried to do some damage control once the patents came to light and addressed the concerns by stating that it files for several patents every year and not all the designs get implemented.
"This does not mean they are necessarily going to be adopted into an aircraft design," said an Airbus spokesperson. "This preserves the innovation and idea."
