The Crystal Cabin Awards were held last week in Hamburg, Germany, and unless you attended the Aircraft Interiors Expo or hosted your own Crystal Cabin party, you might not have heard who won what. The most-buzzed about product might be SII Deutschland’s SANTO Seat, which won the coveted Passenger Comfort Hardware award. The SANTO (Special Accommodation Needs for Toddlers and Overweight Passengers) seat does exactly what it says in its acronym: it is one and a half times as wide as a standard airline seat, so it can comfortably seat either a large passenger or safely hold a child’s booster seat.
Diagram: SII Deutschland
The seat – or seats – would be located at the back of the plane, in the area where the cabin narrows. According to the designers, the SANTO is a much safer option for either small children or large passengers who cannot fit between the armrests of a one-size-fits-most seat. In a press release on the SII Deutschland website, Business Unit Manager Peter Miehlke wrote:
The beneficiaries of this concept are both operators and travelers alike, as for a moderate surcharge, the safety of travelling infants can be significantly increased and the comfort of oversized travelers drastically improved.
How to best to accommodate overweight passengers without embarrassing them (or inconveniencing their more moderately sized seatmates) continues to be an issue for airlines. Director Kevin Smith famously called out Southwest Airlines after he said he was booted from a flight for being “too fat.”
On the flip side, in 2011, a United Airlines passenger said that he had to stand for the duration of a seven hour flight from Philadelphia to Anchorage after being squeezed out of his seat by the “400 pound man” beside him. Last fall, a woman flying on Air New Zealand complained of being unable to sit comfortably beside an impressively overweight man; she stood in the aisle for three-plus hours.
Well, there’s at least three votes for the SANTO seat.