Illustration: Bryan Christie Design
If you're an airplane,more weight means more fuel means more money. (And more carbon emissions, if you track that sort of thing.) You can't expect passengers to lose weight, God forbid, but you can trim the fat elsewhere—like seats. The new SL3510 seats, from German manufacturer Recaro, weigh just 20 pounds each. Using them knocks off a whopping 26 percent from an aircraft's total seat weight—and saves a whole lotta gas money in the process. Here's how Recaro put the airline seat on a diet.
Angle The chair is designed for sub-two-hour flights, so Recaro fixed its lean at 15 degrees and stripped out the reclining mechanism.
Armrests Recaro considered axing the armrest, but customers balked. So the firm settled for a fire-resistant, reinforced plastic compound.
Seat belts Navigating some 30,000 safety regulations meant that certain elements, like lap belts, couldn't change very much.
cushion The team shaved about half a pound of foam from each seat. Now a springy internal diaphragm distributes traveler weight.
secret ingredient Much of the chair's bulky foam is eliminated courtesy of an "innovative netting" whose exact composition Recaro engineers will take to their graves.
Tray tables Since the chairs don't tilt, Recaro could remove the parts that let the tray tables move independently.
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