United Testing Lie-Flat Seats

United aims to boost its brand offering with new lie-flat seats on the fleet’s Boeing 737 Max 10; the seats will be available in first class cabins and are an opportunity for the airline to increase its domestic service perks. The seats likely won’t be available until 2020, after passenger testing is complete.

Hoping to expand its transcontinental premium perks, United Airlines is planning to test lie-flat seats that will be equipped on the fleet’s new Boeing 737 Max 10s when the aircraft arrives in 2020. The product will be available in first class cabins; it already exists on other aircraft in the airline’s arsenal.

“It’s been really successful in the markets that we have it in,” United’s president Scott Kirby told Flight Global. “There are other markets out of Newark and [Washington] Dulles that we would like to have it but we simply don’t have airplanes to do it today. Would San Francisco to Washington DC work? Probably. That’s part about creating a fleet we can experiment with and see which markets work and which don’t.”

Currently, United offers lie-flat seats on 15 757-200s flying between Newark and Boston to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The potential of lie-flat seats in the new planes will enable the airline to phase out the aging 757s, though they will likely seat less passengers in first class than the current offering.

Testing on the lie-flat seats will begin this fall and planes arriving in 2020 will be equipped with the new option. One hundred of the planes are currently on order.

[Photo: Shutterstock]