EK A380 Business Class seats
 

Hey everyone,

I'm flying EK regularly and on the routes to SIN, HKG, BKK most of my flights are on the A380.
It's been a while that I keep wondering about the seats in J. I think there are two different versions. An older one with the old ICE controller etc., and a newer one with several improvements of the seat and the new "iPad like" ICE controllers.

So my question is: on which A380s is the older and on which A380s is the updated setting of the seat in J?

Has it something to do with the registration of the plane (e.g. A6-EDx vs. A6-EEx) or when was the update of the cabin performed?

I just checked the thread about the EK fleet but I didn't find any answer to my question.

I would be glad if anyone has an answer! :)

A380s with registrations A6-EEF to A6-EEV (as of today) offer the updated ICE/seats

Thanks!

The improvements are huge.

I did a return trip to man on a new one then and old one a month later and the difference was huge. The old ones look a little tired now.

Agreed. I much more enjoy the new ones. They feel a bit more spacious.

Well they say knowledge is power, and we now know which a/c have the "new & improved" seats/ICE.

But ultimately I wouldn't think there's any way of working out which aircraft will operate a specific flight number before actually booking a trip .... :confused:

Or am I missing something ?

Emirates taking ‘bedroom concept’ on Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 fleet
 

Shereen El Gazzar

May 21, 2014 Updated: May 22, 2014 16:55:00

Arabian Gulf carriers are competing fiercely over creating new concepts of luxury travel, which includes flying bedrooms similar to those found in a yacht or a hotel.

Only weeks after Etihad Airways announced its premium travel experience – which features private suites, apartments and business studios on its aircraft – Emirates Airline said it would match that by introducing a “bedroom concept”.

“It’s all about privacy. That’s very much in our current first class private suites product, and our new bedroom concept will take it to the next level,” said Tim Clark, the president of Emirates.

“We’re talking fully enclosed rooms, with all the touches and amenities that you’d expect in hotel or a private bedroom on a luxury yacht, room service and so on. It will be on our A380s, and on our new 777s.”

Emirates said that it is in “advanced stages” of developing its bedroom concept. While it did not disclose the cost of a bedroom, it said that its current first class suite costs US$500,000 apiece, and with the 1,500 seats in its current fleet, that is a total investment of $750 million.

.....

http://www.thenational.ae/business/i...#ixzz32YP95lRa

Really:confused:

Sounds about right, the seat itself goes for upwards of 150k USD, add all the IFE, doors, storage, markups for having a "unique" product design etc., and 500k USD doesn't sound too crazy...

I did a double-take on that figure too !!

When you consider that - even in this day & age - people are known to build a fairly sizeable house for that sort of cost, inc. all mod cons, it seems somewhat outlandish for just a few square feet of space on board on an aircraft.

Either Emirates have been well & truly taken for a ride by their suppliers/fitters ; or Tim C wants us to believe the figure so that the F fares he charges seem a positive bargain .......

The engineer in me thought it could be done for well under 25K at the most...:eek:
Besides IFE is just plain software and trust me, your cell phone has more juice than the x86 CPU in the IFE, the doors and storage are just plastic...:p

An aircraft seat is completely unlike building a house and buying an off-the-shelf computer and hooking up to a tv screen and putting some bling finishings around it though...

Consider that the seat has a seven year life at most + design time (from scratch for most of these flagship products) - so with the house analogy, you aren't just building the property, you are hiring an architect and design team to design it from scratch and then build it. Then you have to build something that is going to get abused every day for the next seven years by all manner of people and yet has to work pretty much perfectly with little downtime for maintenance.

Of course, let us not forget that we are talking about something that goes in an aircraft. Seats and everything about them need to be safety certified. New aircraft seats need to withstand 16G of force applied to them without injuring the occupant. You need stringent thermal and acoustic insulation. Remember that each of these seats is going to be individually designed for an airline, at least, for the first airline that purchases them, and so you are going to have to do the whole process from scratch.

Then of course airline customers demand the lightest product possible - every gram is going to be scrutinised for possible reduction. So, a lot of investment is going to go into finding the best possible materials for the job.

Moving onto IFE - it's not much of an incremental cost compared to the cost of a seat, but the same considerations for power efficiency and space and weight - so you're talking about terabytes of solid-state storage for the main server, many many cores which are going to be more powerful than your cell phone :p etc. etc. I think there's information floating about on the internet with regards to IFE systems.

But the major seat cost comes from the specifications that airlines and regulators require. 500k USD is not unreasonable.

Just having returned from a MUC-DXB-MUC roundtrip on two 388 with the new seats (EJ and EQ), I have to say that the seats are really a bit better than the old ones (especially the two full armrests are a huge improvement).

However, the new entertainment system (which is, although they seem to call it "iPad", obviously Android-based due to the screen's aspect ratio) has been a huge letdown. On the outbound flight, the system needed two reboots (one of them specific to my seat) until I could use the most basic functions (the FA seemed to have the reboot interface open on his screen during the entire flight). On the inbound, things were even worse: the IFE on my initially reserved seat 11E didn't even work after two reboots, so I changed to 9E. There, they had to do another two reboots (one of them hard) until I could even play audio. And when I changed to 23A for the landing, the system didn't work properly there, too - I couldn't change airshow channels. I've never had any kind of trouble with the older, brick-like controller IFE.

I've already filed a complaint with EK, and they promised me to get back to me on the phone, let's see what they have to explain.

I don't like the new control systems either. The old hard wired control unit had volume/ pause buttons which were single click and I could operate them even without having to look at it.

The new touchscreen one is not as easy.

What you get is luck of the draw. Have had both new and old on all the A380 routes I have flown and even been on EDB which was put on EK435