One of the major Passenger Experience highlights of the year is coming soon – with the Crystal Cabin Awards finalists announced. 
The Crystal Cabin Awards from 2019 – Image, Economy Class and Beyond.
As usual, there are 8 awards up for grabs. We’ll go through the finalists here
Cabin Concepts
- Finnair, PriestmanGoode and Tangerine, Collins Aerospace with AirLounge – the new Finnair Business Class Seat.
- Teague and NORDAM’s Elevate concept features floating furniture attached to wall braces and combines with materials and contouring to build an organic, homelike space concept that allows the same number of seats to be fitted as traditional designs.
- i4A’s Smart Space 4 Passengers, on the other hand, focuses on maximising comfort options for the economy class. A hinge mechanism built into the seatback allows the seat in front of a passenger to be opened up to the side, allowing access to the seat for use as a leg rest or storage area.
Cabin Systems
- Caeli Nova new Cordillera emergency oxygen system could save the aviation industry $500m and 1.2m tonnes of CO₂ annually by opening direct routes over high terrain and increasing the duration that aircraft can fly at high altitudes after a cabin decompression from 22 minutes to over 180 minutes, without any weight or maintenance penalty. Designed by
- Airbus in cooperation with RECARO Aircraft Seating with Flex OLED Kit is a low-weight, wafer-thin HD display that can be placed anywhere in the cabin, including in-seatbacks and ceilings for video playback, ambient lighting or to direct passengers through the aircraft.
- Flying Disabled, PriestmanGoode, SWS Certification and Sunrise Medical have designed Air 4 All. The system allows travellers with reduced mobility to slot their wheelchair into a seating space by folding the seat up into the backrest, offering wheelchair users a safe and easy way to travel without being forced to move into a standard cabin seat.
Health and Safety
- Safran Cabin’s Fire Resistant Cargo Container adds an additional layer of protection against fire involving lithium batteries. Thanks to its high-temperature resistant panels and unique door materials, Safran’s new device can withstand fire for up to 6 hours.
- Pexco Aerospace and Teague, AirShield uses airflow from existing overhead air vents to create protective air barriers between passengers. Exhaled air is redirected downwards and out of the cabin to the aircraft’s filtration units.
- Collins Aerospace’s Hypergamut Light is a new cabin lighting system attuned to human biology that helps passengers feel more comfortable during and after their flight. Compatible with human circadian rhythms, the system’s architecture attenuates blue light in a unique way that helps passengers relax even with the lights on and fall asleep faster on long haul flights.
Passenger Comfort
- ZIM Aircraft Seating’s ZIMprivacy seat manages to increase passenger comfort while also prioritising privacy giving more living space and a heightened sense of personal enclosure.
- Jamco Corporation and NTT sonority Inc present their Personalized Sound Zone. Using loudspeakers built into the headrest, PSZ creates a spherical audio area around the passenger’s head where playback is heard by the passenger but is inaudible to others in the cabin. The system achieves this without the need for headphones and audio cables by using wave cancellation to ‘build’ a sound stage around the passenger.
- Collins Aerospace’s SpaceChiller offers personal refrigeration for individual passengers. The system provides the luxury of cooled snacks for passengers in a compact device that requires half the power of traditional designs.
IFEC & Digital Services
- Anuvu and Southwest Airlines have designed a new system called Dedicated Space, promising a five-fold increase in available personal bandwidth and a dramatic reduction in latency. Along with faster downloads and uploads, passengers are promised more stable inflight connectivity with the new system. Traditionally, IFE is an area where passengers have come to expect less from in-flight systems than from entertainment equipment in their homes.
- Thales Avionics and Harman have cooperated to bring end-to-end 4K video quality to aircraft. Optiq is the first QLED IFE display, providing better resolution, colour fidelity and dynamics range, while offering better maintainability for operators
- Airbus Corporate Jets and Latécoère Interconnection Systems present The Smart Lifi Monitor. It pairs with customers’ personal digital devices which can then be used as a remote control. It also offers Video-on-Demand live television, moving maps, video conferencing and more, making a wider spectrum of digital services and functions available to aircraft passengers.
Material & Components
- Thales Avionics has engineered Pulse, a slim, low-weight power supply unit with dynamic power allocation that lets passengers recharge their device on-wing via USB-A, USB-C or wireless charging.
- Diehl Aviation’s security device for crew handhelds allows the crew to use digital devices behind a screen mounted in a lockable door to keep tablets safe from theft.
- Lufthansa Technik’s CabinSHINE maintenance process is designed to make repairing fixtures and furniture up to eight times cheaper and nine times faster than using conventional methods. Offering repair options for a range of cabin surface materials and imitation surfaces, the process helps avoid replacing superficially damaged aircraft furniture by quickly repairing surface blemishes during short overhaul stops.
Sustainable Cabin
- AkzoNobel, Rescoll and Roctool, and Swedish manufacturer Diab have pioneered a thermoplastics manufacturing process to produce 100% recyclable panels for cabin interiors.
- Lantal Textiles and Olivenleder have come up with Sustainable Genuine Leather, which uses a tanning process based on vegetable oils instead of chrome- and gasoline-based chemicals, with no compromises on haptic quality.
- Lufthansa Technik AG’s AeroFLAX prepreg. Using natural fibres and a bio-based resin system instead of glass fibre, AeroFLAX saves CO₂ not only as a by-product of weight reduction but also during the manufacturing process itself.
University
- Carlos Gatti, a student at Wichita State University, has come up with a novel way of accommodating wheelchair passengers. The Fly Your Wheels Suite replaces the front left closet on aircraft like the Boeing 737-800 with a multi-purpose module that can function as a safe parking berth for a wheelchair user during a flight. Rather than taking away existing seating, the idea would let airlines add one paying passenger – the wheelchair user.
- Jiayi Yu from the University of Reutlingen designed the Shift Cabin Interior, a study that allows operators to configure seats in multiple positions for work or relaxation, both along the axis of the seat as well as to the side. Aside from the advantage of flexibility, the concept lets airlines fit more seats into the same business class space.
§
- Ken Kirtland of the Georgia Institute of Technology has high aims with Portal: to create an electric short-haul airline based around an innovative aircraft that emphasises a calmer flight experience at slower speeds and fantastic views.
We’ll find out on…
… the 14th June in Hamburg.
The Crystal Cabin Awards are traditionally held during the Passenger Experience Week in Hamburg, comprising of the Passenger Experience Conference, Aircraft Interiors Expo, World Travel and Catering Expo and of course – the Crystal Cabin Awards.
Economy Class and Beyond will be covering this in some way or form – we’re working on the details at the moment.
We’ll also be in Hamburg for the Passenger Experience Conference and Aircraft Interiors Expo. We’ve launched our Connect at AIX 2022 page.
Come and connect with us!
Welcome to Economy Class and Beyond – Your no-nonsense guide to network news, honest reviews, featuring in-depth coverage, unique research, as well as the humour and madness I only know how to deliver.
Follow me on Twitter at @EconomyBeyond for the latest updates! You can follow me on Instagram too!
Also remember that we are part of the BoardingArea community, bringing you the latest frequent flyer news from around the world.
