There’s no hotter battleground in the airline industry than the seat of your pants.

 

Literally.

 

Airline ads regularly regale flyers, touting their Business Class seat as best. Lie flat, slightly slanted, consummately cocooned. They’re where the money is made.

 

“Business Class, far and away, is the most profitable cabin,” Andy Severence, American Airlines’ manager of cabin interior planning, says. It certainly renders more revenue than coach, even—surprisingly—than First Class.

 

Now, something legitimately new, a seat that sets itself immediately apart from the pack.

 

American Airlines’ Next-Generation Business Class seat is an intimate, infinitely adjustable affair. It’s ensconced in a shell that affords plenty of privacy, and comes fitted with an on-demand audio and video setup that looks like it was ripped from the cockpit of an F-16.

Frequent Flyer test-flew the $25,000 seats ($50,000 per pair, or “seat set”) on the ground. (We plan to test fly them aloft in the coming months.)  Here’s what we found:

- Almost unlimited adjustability. Designed in American’s version of the “Skunkworks” (the super-secret Lockheed lab where exotic warplanes are designed), Jim Hadden says the new Business Class seat sports “more adjustability than just about anything else in the industry.” Hadden is AA’s manager of cabin design. And his assessment isn’t hyperbolic.

Powering the positioning of the seat are five independent motors. Most seats have far fewer. Hit “recline” and you recline the back—nothing else. Move the leg rests, and only they move. “You can tweak it a lot more,” Hadden says, “without getting into positions you don’t want to.”

 

- Common sense comfort. The unseen battle in the airline industry is between those pushing maximum passenger comfort, and those who want to wring every last ounce of revenue from a flight. American has managed—in cooperation with seat manufacturer Recaro—to create a device that appears to work on both levels.

 

Airlines wage pitched battles about seat pitch—legroom. The greater the pitch, the fewer seats you can fit in an airplane. But fewer seats mean fewer upgrades.

 

When American started working on a new Business Class seat back in 2000, Hadden says the challenge wasn’t just ergonomic, it was economic. The carrier wanted to “upscale the product, and keep the same seat count” in Business Class. On the 767-300, American’s prime transatlantic hauler, that’s 30 seats.

 

That meant 180-degree, horizontal lie-flat seats were out, the kind offered in C Class by American’s oneworld alliance partner, British Airways.

 

American strapped monitors to the wrists of volunteers and put them in seats that were fully flat, and those that weren’t. Hadden says the study showed flyers who slept in a “Z” position—the kind you assume back in your recliner at home—slept fully as well as those lying fully flat. American’s Business Class seats are flat, but flat-at-an-angle.

 

In the end, Hadden and Severence were able to design a setup with 59 inches of pitch—but a bed that’s 77 inches long. They did this by allowing the legs of flyers to fit comfortably under the shell enclosure in front of them.

 

A personal note: Reporter Jerome Greer Chandler has never been able to really get into solid REM sleep on any airplane, under any circumstances—not even in perhaps the penultimate of jet-age beds. Those once came courtesy of Philippine Airlines, where entire upper decks of their 747s were converted into curtained sleeping areas for First Class flyers.

 

- Wondrous workspace. Traditional Business Class seats may have enough room to work, but it’s not really usable room. To work right, your bed may not have to be fully flat, but your workspace does. To that end, this Next-Generation Business Class seat offers two tables. One extends from the seat itself, the other folds down from the shell. In a nifty piece of engineering, they join virtually seamlessly. The result is 289 square inches of space—enough to set up your laptop, and array the requisite papers around it. When the flight attendant comes by with drinks, you don’t have to start stowing stuff away. There’s enough space for a beer and your balance sheet. Neat. But not if you can’t get in the proper position to type without straining your wrists. This is where ergonomics comes into play again, and one of those five independent motors kicks in. The seat tracks forward, so you can scooch up to the computer without having to prop a couple of pillows behind your back.

 

 - Hand-held entertainment. When American first introduced personal video in Business Class back in the ‘80s, flight attendants provided flyers with their own laptop players. You propped them up on a pillow and popped in your selection of 8mm cassettes. Now, it’s back to the future—but with a decided twist.

 

The video is on-demand now. Nothing new there. But the viewing parameters are pliant; the screen semi-portable. Leave it in the shell and watch it. Pull it out of the shell and put it on your tray table, even pull a cover over your head if you want to and snuggle up close—like when you were a kid.

 

On first sitting down in this thing, that’s exactly what you feel like—a kid. Jaded frequent flyers who’ve been there and flown that will be taken aback—at least for a bit—by this new assembly.

 

American expects to fully fit its fleet of 767-300s with the new seats by the end of the first quarter of 2007. About the time work is finished on the 767s, AA starts installing the seats on its largest aircraft—the 777. That work should be finished by the end of next year.

 

Hadden says AA will have the Next-Generation Business Class seat all to itself for a while, on an exclusive basis. “But at some point in time,” he says, “Recaro will let other people have it.”

 

Until then, the AAdvantage remains all American’s.