Asian Airlines: Sky's the Limit for Luxury

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In-flight Communication Flying High

That means plenty of recurring business for Lantal Textiles of Switzerland, especially its Lantal Transportation Fashion division, which provides thousands of different textiles for seats, carpets, and walls. Its leather line alone comes in 64 standard colors. Lantal has also developed a pneumatic seat cushion as an alternative to foam. These seats save money for carriers, with weight savings of up to 2kg (about 4.4 pounds) in wide seats, and allow greater comfort to passengers as pressure can be varied from firm when upright to soft when reclining.

In-flight mobile communications are about to become a reality, too. OnAir, owned jointly by Airbus and SITA, will introduce a service before the end of the year that allows people to use their own phones, laptops, and other portable electronic devices such as the BlackBerry. Air France, RyanAir, AirAsia, Shenzhen Airlines, and India's Kingfisher Airlines have announced plans to go with the service.

The OnAir system involves a GSM server, base station, and antenna on board and will connect to satellites. This system solves the problems of conventional mobile-phone use interfering with avionics, which is caused when phones radiate at maximum power while attempting to locate terrestrial networks.

With greater comfort and convenience come challenges for safety, however. John Yun, sales executive at Phoenix-based Amsafe Aviation, the only Federal Aviation Administration-certified maker of air bags, says as premier seating evolves, the risk of head injury is greater compared with standard bench seating: "There are too many places where a passenger could hit his head, become unconscious or even [die]." Amsafe has provided air bags primarily for business and first-class for Virgin Atlantic and Japan Airlines, while Cathay is installing them in the seat belts of all classes of its new planes. The likelihood of U.S. carriers installing air bags will increase with time as the FAA's 2009 deadline for better protection against dynamic crash conditions approaches.

Balfour is Asia Correspondent for BusinessWeek based in Hong Kong.