Rebound

They said they did when i went to Hanger9.

serfty

Me too, but in relation to my above post on objectivity, there is a big difference between:

• Being paid to test it - as against paying for it
• Being in a Hangar 9 with maybe 12(?) of these seats - as against being cooped up with another 47 PAX and traffic.

In any case, I am sure AirNZ are reviewing their Product Assurance Testing processes.

serfty

This indicates the Pitch for PE as 36" - they are packed with 7 rows along the windows/between bulkheads.

So that mean 6 x 36" for row 23 to row 29; equals 216".

Removing one row means that 216" needs to be divided by 5; giving 43". (In reality it will be a little less than that).

So up to an additional 7" (17cm) may be available by doing this. I wonder if this is enough.

mad_atta

Bear in mind that pitch doesn't take into account the fact that your legs are on a diagonal, so the effective seat pitch is several inches more. Though I guess when you recline, the sliding forward effect would mean that extra would be negated again.

If they remove a row, won't the seats and their footwells no longer line up properly? (I've not actually been in them myself, so apologies if that makes no sense.)

serfty

Going by the image linked to in post #123, I don't believe the footwells lined up in most cases. In fact reports are that 'talls' needed to contort their body to use the foot wells when trying to sleep.

ajnz

I'm not sure I buy that the effective legroom is more. I can honestly state I felt I had more legroom in Y on a LH A320 recently than I did in U on the NZ 773.

everywhere

You have such great comparisons that come from your frequent painful self-experiments.

ThatJohn

Yep, that's me!

[Disclaimer: I tend not to participate on FlyerTalk forums for airlines we cover at Australian Business Traveller in order to avoid any appearance of commercial activity or marketing our posts. I figure that enough people read our stuff that if there's FT interest, it'll end up here anyway. I'm always willing to enter into conversations via PM here, or my Twitter and email are listed on every story I write for AusBT.]

As it happens, I've been poking Air NZ's media contacts about these rumours for a while. We'll see what comes of it.

At any rate, I'm not sure that the idea of pulling out a row really works on the 77W, since there are 7 rows in seats AB, 10 in DE and 8 in JK, so you'd end up with different pitch in each "column".

(Also: since I'm a choral singer, my German is mostly limited to being able to sing Lieder and Oratorio. Having just sung a Bach St Matthew Passion here in Wellington, the phrase "der Economy-Hölle" [the Economy Hell] tickles me something silly.)

Dogs_Ears_Up

Just being curious - Does that mean that, all things considered, you would rather fly a long-haul sector in Y on an LH A320 than in U on the NZ773?

ajnz

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9650; en-GB) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.431 Mobile Safari/534.1+)

No. What I wrote is that the LH Y product felt more spacious than NZ U product. I don't see the LH 320 doing long haul sectors any time soon.

I certainly would not pay for the new NZ U product again. If I'm going to be uncomfortable I may as well save several thousand dollars and sit in Y - on LH or QF or NZ or UA or whoever else.

ajnz

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9650; en-GB) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.431 Mobile Safari/534.1+)

No. What I wrote is that the LH Y product felt more spacious than NZ U product. I don't see the LH 320 doing long haul sectors any time soon.

I certainly would not pay for the new NZ U product again. If I'm going to be uncomfortable I may as well save several thousand dollars and sit in Y - on LH or QF or NZ or UA or whoever else.

mad_atta

Assuming the footwells line up properly, then the effective pitch must be more, as it's simple mathematics.

As for real world legroom, though, it's reduced by the 'every seat a bulkhead' effect. I absolutely detest bulkheads for that reason. Row 1 of business class on the A320 used to annoy me no end.

flyboy2000

Had the opportunity to get onboard the 777 this week for a look and am sure I will just be repeating all that's said here, especially around the Premium Economy. Most seats felt very "enclosed" and the legroom was hopeless. One of the NZ people onboard said they have had lots of similar feedback and were considering how to improve the legroom issue. I am over 6ft tall and I was definitely more comfortable in Economy than PE. Business seemed ok though the overall impression of the aircraft was style over substance.

ajnz

I can't see how. My knees were jammed against the footwell.

Rebound

The engineers that designed the tray tables have since both departed from Altitude, and from what i've read that seems to be one of the issues with increasing the pitch by removing a row (along with alignment too)