You normally don’t think a lot would go into the construction of a chair. However, when that chair is attached to a commercial jet plane, there’s a lot of technology that goes into making sure they are safe. According to a recent BBC article, testing involves crash dummies and robot arms.
Admittedly, these are first-class and business-class seats. Robots do repetitive mundane tasks like opening and closing the tray table many, many times. They also shoot the seats with crash dummies aboard at up to 16 Gs of acceleration. Just to put that into perspective, a jet pilot ejecting gets about the same amount of force. A MiG-35 pilot might experience 10 G.
We didn’t realize how big the airline seat industry is in Northern Ireland. Thompson, the company that has the lab in question, is only one of the companies in the country that builds seats. Apparently, the industry suffered from the global travel slowdown during the pandemic but is now bouncing back.
While people worry about robots taking jobs, we can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend all day returning their tray table to the upright and locked position repeatedly. We certainly don’t want to be 16 G crash dummies, either.
Crash dummies have a long history, of course. Be glad airliners don’t feature ejector seats.
“we can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend all day returning their tray table to the upright and locked position repeatedly”
Try the kid sat behind me on my last flight.
Thank you, internet stranger, for making me laugh out loud.
Lmao!
That’s why ‘The Troubles’ have ended.
The Irish are taking out all their aggression on airline passengers!
The most unwanted chairs!
Someone should make padded pants and a shirt to make airline seats somewhat comfortable.
Like shellhead spandex padded bike pants.
But for airline seats (vs. ass violator road bike seats). I digress.
Interesting, but not a hack.
True dat!
I fly frequently and I am impressed how much engineering has been put to make those seats uncomfortable. They bent your spine and put a lot of stress all over meanwhile giving no support for your neck so your head can do the stress job on your neck as soon as you fall asleep. Maybe they could collaborate with Ikea and buy some of their cheapest office chair? I have seen people having good sleep at work in my office. Sometimes for many hours and no one was using this neck support so popular among frequent flyers (it never worked for me though).
Looking at those dummies I now know why airline seats are so crap.
How about having more representative dummies like the fat slob who overflowed his seat on my last trip, or the over 2 metre giant who found it almost impossible to find a comfortable position and spent the entire 13 hours squirming.
I wouldn’t describe myself as either of those, but when my elbows take up both armrests while my arms are at my sides, it’s too narrow. They need to assume someone might have shoulders.