Originally Posted by
redtop43
I've flown 789's and A332's, but I've only every flown a 777 once, it was 10 years ago in J on Air France from CDG-ATL. On that flight the seating in J was 2-3-2 across, it was comfortable but they weren't lie-flats and weren't pod-like.
The AA 777's appear to have 4 across in both F and J, but the plane is wider than the 787 or 330. How does this play out? Are the aisles just significantly wider? Or the pods?
Short answer:
In most cases, the size of the seat pods is constant and aisle width varies.
Slightly less short answer:
If you think of the solution in terms of simple 2d geometry, its easy to understand. AA’s seats are arranged in a herringbone layout, not too distant in concept to staggered parking bays you commonly find in parking lots.
The seat itself is located inside a parallelogram footprint and rotated so that the head and feet are positioned at opposite acute angled corners of the parallelogram. Here’s the clever bit - the angle of rotation is very sensitive and is optimised across the industry at 28°. Reduce this angle, the seats get longer but the width narrows. Increase the angle and you get the opposite effect.
Across the fleet, AA uses three different business seats: Cirrus II (777-300), Super Diamond (777-200, 787-8, 787-9), as well as it own Concept D seat (777-200, 787-8).
The Cirrus II and Super Diamond seats are both proprietary products designed to be plopped into the 777 and 787. With both products, the seats are rotated 28°. Compact versions of the Cirrus product have also been supplied to Cathay Pacific (A330) and Finnair (A350). The Cirrus IIs fitted to American’s own A321Ts have an upscaled footprint.
So with the proprietary seats variations of cabin width is taken up in the aisle.
The Concept D was developed differently, where the seat itself was tailored individually for the 777 and 787. With the 777, the seat is rotated 28° like the Cirrus and Super Diamond. However with the 787, to get the seat to fit, the angle of rotation was reduced to 27° which results in a slightly narrower footprint. The seats are effectively equal other than the footrests which on the 787 come to sharper point.