I went spelunking in the United States Patent and Trademark Office cave and came out with a gem of a find. Its title: AIRCRAFT. Clever, I know. This AIRCRAFT patent (filed by The Boeing Company) claims to depict "The ornamental design for an aircraft." It does not disappoint. There's not a whole lot of textual meat to the application, which is why the visuals are so important.
Patent D0580864 looks pretty radical. Two cabins with stadium style forward sloping seating with a two level lounge area separating the two cabins. It may kill cargo capacity, but it sure looks interesting. It would certainly rule out anyone from the economy cabin using the premiums lavs.
My colleague asked me, what aircraft it was modeled on and I thought for for a moment that it was arbitrary, but it struck me that it bore a striking resemblance to the Sonic Cruiser design from 2001-2002.
I dug a bit deeper into the 5-page patent and the cabin arrangement shows 214 seats in a two-class configuration; premium holds 35 and economy 179. The seat layout fits loosely into the same aircraft class as 787 and A330. What a wild design. I threw this graphic together (with the help of the Flight archives) to give you a sense of the comparison.
Patent D0580864 looks pretty radical. Two cabins with stadium style forward sloping seating with a two level lounge area separating the two cabins. It may kill cargo capacity, but it sure looks interesting. It would certainly rule out anyone from the economy cabin using the premiums lavs.
My colleague asked me, what aircraft it was modeled on and I thought for for a moment that it was arbitrary, but it struck me that it bore a striking resemblance to the Sonic Cruiser design from 2001-2002.
I dug a bit deeper into the 5-page patent and the cabin arrangement shows 214 seats in a two-class configuration; premium holds 35 and economy 179. The seat layout fits loosely into the same aircraft class as 787 and A330. What a wild design. I threw this graphic together (with the help of the Flight archives) to give you a sense of the comparison.
Great! Now this layout though radical might prove to be impractical for:
1. Evacuation - Imagine passengers will now have to run maybe upwards towards the exit.
2. Flight Attendants- Now they to have to push the drinks/food carts all the way up one level through the sloped cabin!
I really doubt if this could ever be implemented for real! Nice imagination though...
It's a great concept worth patenting at least. And not intending to continue the downer, but it would also handicap cargo space, which we know is what really makes the airlines money.
Maybe this is just to keep the floor level during cruise flight?
Why don't the windows reflect the positions of the seats? You'd think they too would slope toward the front.
Neat, but the window line has not been adapted to match the floor line. Some front-row passengers will be displeased when they find that their viewing window is actually a skylight.
Is this a flying movie theater, to get rid of windows cutouts and lighten the fuselage? Just perfect for being held hostage to sales brainwashing and holywood dross for the entire duration of a long haul flight. Please switch off your brains and mobiles :)
Is this a flying movie theater, to get rid of windows cutouts and lighten the fuselage? Just perfect for being held hostage to sales brainwashing and holywood dross for the entire duration of a long haul flight. Please switch off your brains and mobiles :)
Wonder how this would work on a BWB type design? The stadium seating would help make it seem not-so-vast.
The diagrams of the sonic cruiser were photoshopped-in by Jon. The actual patent document just contains the cut-out of the salon. There is no indication of any sort of windows.
Also, there appears to be a sizeable cargo area just aft of the Y section, which would likely hold baggage. There also appears to be space below the lounge and rear of J for yet more cargo.
Its different I'll give Boeing that at least but a couple of issues do spring to mind. Windows or not who wants to spend hours looking down to their seatback IFE display. Then, depending on seat pitch, the last time I went to the cinema being fairly tall was a nightmare on my knees. I wonder where they're going with this?
This seems incredibly impractical - less cargo space (yes, there is some under the premium section and some behind Y, but you could have that anyway, even without a sloping floor), very inflexibel regarding Y vs. 1st seating, the overhead bins would be pretty high up for those seated at the front of each section, the flight attendands would have to push the trolleys upwards (or you need some technology to pull the trolleys)...
Actually, what indeed is the advantage of this configuration? More headroom for some _really_ tall people? Or would this serve some weight-distribution issue that a plane with a wing configuration like the Sonic Cruiser might have?
What happens if it's not targeted for the Sonic Cruiser, but for a waverider supersonic design?
Photoshop in the outline of the XB-70, and perhaps you can see where elevation changes in the cabin design might be useful. (Obviously this is much wider than the Valkyrie, but what other waverider designs have flown?) In addition, fuselage heating and expansion issues, as well as the attitude changes during cruise as john sticklemaier pointed out, become much larger problems for supersonic flight.
If a seatback display was good enough and could be used as a window (or better), window in aircraft as we know it would probably not be missed and could even be seen as somewhat archaic.
Methinks the stadium seating is a nice response to canard-configuration constraints. The high-mounted canard needs structural depth at the top of the fuselage, pushing the front floor down. The low-mounted wing needs structural depth near the bottom of the fuselage, pushing the aft floor up. So its a choice of single-stadium or tandem-stadium flooring.
On top of that, the canard configuration (probably) needs to have the CG much more rearwards compared to a conventional configuration. If so putting large cargo holds mid-fuselage is infeasible. In which case, you can make premium and economy seating stadium style, give them independent entrance hallways, and have all the doors at the same level.
KaeroMan