Diehl on why its nose-to-tail content doesn't include seats

With a portfolio that spans everything from passenger-facing solutions like aircraft lavatories, overhead bins, cabin lining and LED lighting to underlying systems for water, ducting, and air management, plus a JV with Thales that provides avionics, Diehl Aviation is a true nose-to-tail provider of content in commercial aviation — and crucially, serves as a major integrator.

But even though it is also the global market leader for crew rest compartments, there is one facet of the cabin in which Diehl has no interest in getting involved: passenger seating.

“I’m not interested, and I’m continuing to tell everyone,” company CEO Dr. Jörg Schuler told Runway Girl Network when we asked the question that Diehl is increasingly fielding from industry stakeholders: will the Tier 1 supplier make a foray into aircraft seating, perhaps by acquiring one of the many seatmakers who exhibit at the annual Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg?

“It’s a super fascinating product. And it’s a very differentiating product. It is the differentiating product, besides IFE,” Dr. Schuler said of aircraft seats. “These two are what the passenger experiences more than anything else.”

At the same time, he said, the aircraft seat market is very crowded, hotly competitive, and working against an imperative to constantly drive weight out of their seats. That’s especially true in economy class where “you need to get lighter, lighter, lighter and more innovative” and where “the competition is so high and there are so many [seatmakers] that I’m really not interested,” he said.

“The two big players, Collins and Safran, are dominating it, and you obviously have RECARO. Even the Gevens of this world have a big market share. I don’t see a place and I don’t believe that you need the seat in order to make a difference in the rest of the cabin.”

Making a difference in other ways, Diehl continues to expand its portfolio including to enhance industry’s sustainability credentials, improve passenger accessibility, and support airlines’ cabin customization initiatives.

Even if sustainability “is not so popular in the press anymore and people are putting the importance a bit to the back,” Dr. Schuler said, Diehl is still pioneering eco-conscious solutions. He pointed to the firm’s new ECO Bin, which is recyclable at the end of life, and its ultra-lightweight ECO Bracket, which is made from recycled thermoplastic production scrap.

Its accessibility work, meanwhile, is laudable. A two-time winner of the coveted Crystal Cabin Award in the Accessibility category, Diehl took home the prize last year for its Space³ innovation, which allows two side-by-side lavatories to be turned into one larger-footprint space for widebody aircraft, and again this year for an Adaptive User Routing System (AURS) that makes lavs navigable for passengers with visual or hearing impairments. Diehl is now working on a narrowbody version of Space³.

Accommodating persons of reduced mobility (PRMs) on board will simply become an expectation of all passengers, Dr. Schuler predicted, not unlike how “classic” seatback IFE became an expectation, even though it proved to be a cost point for airlines.

Diehl played a key role in industry’s adoption of energy-efficient LED technology, including for the Boeing 787. In recent years, it has expanded its customization work, adding compelling projector technology and advanced eDecor-branded electronic paper technology to enable virtually any scenario in the cabin, as the firm demonstrated at AIX.

“There are millions of possibilities,” Dr. Schuler said of Diehl’s ability to dramatically change the ambience on board by using a combination of mood lighting, eDecor and projector technology, and integrating them into the cabin experience.

And that is, perhaps, the German firm’s secret sauce. While it offers a variety of standalone products in aviation, “it’s very important also to demonstrate our integration capabilities because we are serving the full value chain. We do end-to-end, but we are really able to integrate the whole cabin — system into system, and then cabin into aircraft or into the airframe,” the Diehl Aviation CEO noted.

“For us, it’s really important because configuration management is a key differentiator; knowing the product and knowing how to support customization and to find ways to support that in a lean way… because that’s what we are good at.”