The seating itself is fine to me, with a little extra space between passengers – the issue for me is that if you're in an aisle seat, every time the person next to you (in the window seat) leaves or returns to their seat they'll be very close to you due to the narrow gap between seats, and I would not want to have any passenger's rear-end that close to my face!



I think it just comes to limited floor space, no matter what tricks of 'geometry' are invoked you end up with two-abreast, and while you can engineer a little bit of a gap with this staggered layout, it just doesn't seem practical.

Either way, Cathay's A330 regional business class flatbed is now in pre-production (from what I understand). I'd be surprised if it has doors, although as the airline is designing for the years ahead, who can tell...the rest of the formula would seem to be relatively straightforward and everyone here would know the ingredients (flatbed, large 4K video screen with Bluetooth streaming, USB-C and wireless charging etc). Honestly, if you just went for an updated version of FB2.5 (A350 J) then it'd be hard to go wrong, this seat still ranks on my favourites for long-haul non-suite business class.