HAMBURG — Startup seatmaker Unum hit the Aircraft Interiors Expo this year as a Crystal Cabin Award finalist, with a seat ready for critical design review stage, an innovative folding not-a-door privacy screen, and its first launch customer.

Runway Girl Network caught up with chief executive Chris Brady and the Unum team the evening before the show opened, and he tells us that, after last year’s AIX, the market response — including on the airframer side — was that the capacity for linefit struggle was substantial, especially for smaller volumes of shipsets.

“Last year, one of the things that came clearly from the market and the data was that the A330 and the A320 are the market for us,” Brady says. “It’s that fleet of airframes that has been around for a while, plenty of them around, retrofittable, in the retrofit window. Unlike the 777, they’re in in small groupings — the 777s are only really owned by the flag carriers, in fleets of 15 and above.”

As a result, of the several airframe-specific options Unum was mooting last year, it has spent the past eleven months focussing on maturing its most likely candidates.

“We finished the A330, and what you see now is a 79 kilo, flight ready, fully realised, even with [Safran] RAVE IFE properly integrated,” Brady explains. “It’s a CDR seat: it’s just one tiny iteration away from putting it in serial production. All of the weight forecasts have come true, and it’s unbelievably light, because it’s simple. It each part works together with its neighbour with no intermediate bracket, which adds a few grams. And that 10%, 15% of extra weight, realises that 79 kilos seat, 87 kilos with a sliding door.”

Meanwhile, Unum expects an initial technical coordination meeting in June or July for its first narrowbody customer — surprisingly, for a single-aisle retrofit Boeing 737 programme.

So, how, RGN asked, is the 737 version of Unum’s seat different to the Airbus A320 (most likely A321XLR) version of the product?

“Not at all, actually. We’ve harmonised the two seats. There is still an 80 inch bed on both of them, but they’re the same set of tools from our point of view, and the same certification. The track adapters are subtly different, but really, really close,” Brady says. “There’s the one difference is in the bottom of the footwell on the A320, there’s a power bulge to make use of that extra space. It’s very interesting that the two aircraft end up being the same from head height down to elbow height, and then the same from shin height to the floor. But between knee and hip there’s room for a bulge on the A320.”

Unum’s question to airlines and other potential collaborators at the show this year is around its origami-inspired Door 2.0 concept, a folded stiff fabric that expands from one quarter of the size of its fully deployed suite door-replacement size. Magnets secure it at the three corners to which it expands, and the concept is inherently light owing to a lack of thermoplastics (and indeed economics).

The concept itself is a fascinating one, perhaps more so for the feedback and ideas it is already generating. Its elegant simplicity is precisely the way that aviation is likely to answer the ongoing question of doors vs no doors in business class, especially in the thorny context of weight savings driving sustainability and emissions improvements. If the 8 kilos per sliding door can be saved over even a relatively small business class cabin, the multiplication of the carbon implications of that door over its lifetime are immense.

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Featured image from Unum booth credited to John Walton