Airbus' new concept offers swappable spas, cafes

The idea is to enable an airline to mix and match aircraft interiors like Lego pieces.

Global aircraft manufacturer Airbus has revealed plans for a new type of airplane cabin that could radically change the travel experience when it eventually comes to market.
The aviation giant hopes to make a reality with Transpose, a development from A3, the advanced projects and partnerships division of Airbus located in Silicon Valley. Indeed, the project is a rethinking what an airline cabin can be for passengers by making it quickly and inexpensively flexible. Transpose envisages to use swappable plane interiors to offer travellers everything from restaurants to spas to co-working spaces while aloft.
"This is a clean sheet rethink of cabin design and architecture," said Jason Chua, project executive at A3. This is not just a new plane - a new idea of what a plane can be.
The idea is to enable an airline to mix and match aircraft interiors like Lego pieces. The plan is to create a modular commercial aircraft cabin system that would fill freight aircraft with fixed-size cabin compartments that can be reconfigured very quickly. Chua said the chief innovation here is that Transpose doesn't require radically new aircraft or airport infrastructure, both of which would take decades to design, test, and introduce. "Cargo planes already have the right hardware to allow modular cabins. They have large doors and reinforced floor rails, so freight containers can slide in and out, but keep still in flight. Workers can unload and reload an entire interior within an hour."
Like trains that add and remove sleeper cabins and cafe cars, Airbus is experimenting with the same concept for planes. Each module, piece-by-piece, would load on and off through a large cargo door onto a modified and nearly-windowless freighter. The goal is to give airlines a blank canvas on which to design a new passenger experience and expand their revenue model beyond traditional tickets and fees, said Chua.
When the aircraft reaches its destination, each section could be unloaded quickly individually and the entire aircraft reconfigured for the next route.
This type of modular technology is already used to shift freight pallets in cargo aircraft, but Airbus's proposed application of it is new - and reimagines what commercial air travel can be. Hypothetically, an aircraft could be fitted with sleeping pods for a red-eye from New York to London, and then swapped - in less than an hour - for a coffee shop and standard seating on a flight from London to Athens.
Airbus's design isn't the only future vision without a view. Aerospace engineers at Boeing have long been studying a blended wing body design that is leaps more efficient than traditional planes.
- issacjohn@khaleejtimes.com