For those of you who can remember, air travel used to be an event: piano bars, in-flight sommeliers, and waiters in white suits who dished out caviar. Now you are lucky if you get a snack. Cramped, elbow-to-elbow seating, limited leg room and seats that recline into someone’s lap seem to be the reality. But, perhaps not in the future.
David Kondo, the manager of cabin interior development at Finnair said, “Imagine boarding a plane and the seat recognizing who you are and remembering exactly how you like to sit, and setting up your entertainment,” he says.
In Kondo’s ideal world, passengers would have their own mini-suite. There would be different sizes from single person mini-cabins to suites for a family, even a separate dining area—an airborne Orient Express.