Cabin dividers

[Lite]

I've never worked for an airline that uses a cabin divider system, whereby the airline is able to simply move a curtain along the cabin to differentiate which seats are business class & which are economy class - but it seems to be popular with most of the major European carriers.

So, is anyone able to tell me how it works?

When does the airline decide how many seats are needed for which cabin? Just before the flight? A day before?

How do you differentiate the size of seats & legspace per row if all your doing is seperating business & economy by a curtain?

Thanks for any help!:ok:

[c.r.m what is it]

I fly on the airbus a320/321 and it is decided on the day, depending on the club load how many rows we have. It is very easy to move the curtain, and it can go back until about row 10-12. The seats can also be moved, so on one side they fold up and become two seats, whilst the other side they are stretched and become 3 slightly larger seats. all in all, it takes the ground staff, a couple of mins at the most!!!!

[Young Paul]

How far back the curtain can go depends on how many rows of the adjustable seats there are. On our aircraft, only the last few rows aren't adjustable - so you might have a config of 115/17 on a 320, for example!

There are two sorts of side curtain, depending upon whether they are affected by the drop-down screens. Most annoying feature - when it has to move by one row in a turnaround and you have to retrieve the other sort of curtain from the back.

Incidentally, the original intention was that the curtains and seats would stay in place for a whole day - or move at most once. The seat adjustment mechanism, like most other mechanical moving parts, is one of the weaknesses of the system.

[WHBM]

From a pax point of view, legroom is unchanged during seat adjustment for obvious reasons (like the seats lining up with the supplementary oxygen units above), and therefore the number of rows with C-class legroom has to be the maximum number envisaged.

So when the divider is well forward, like on an off-peak flight, or even if operating as a Y-class only flight, when travelling Y it is always worth asking for a seat that is far forward on adjustable aircraft because you may well get C-class legroom, if not the width or the cabin service.

Regulars, of course, get to know the relevant seat rows. Some airlines I believe by default put their elites travelling Y into these seats.

[wawkrk]

In the good old days with KLM (until last year)The 737 always had more rows of 2+3 business seating than was required, so you could have business class in economy (seatwise).On one particular flight a colleague and I were seated in economy.The purser moved the curtain after looking at his load sheet to the row behind us.
I thanked him for the upgrade.He looked at his sheet again and said oh,sorry,and downgraded us again.
KLM have now solved this problem.All seats are economy 3+3 but you you can sit behind the curtain if you multiply the price of the ticket by 3.

[Young Paul]

In some situations the legroom is unchanged (i.e. the same) throughout the cabin. So sitting in C only gives armroom benefit, not legroom.

[TURIN]

The seat width adjustment varies with type and operator.
Iberia, for example have electrcally operated seats that expand/contract at the push of a button, BA on the other hand have to have each seat row pushed/pulled into position.
Iberia's cabin crew adjust their seats.
BA get the cleaners to do it.:suspect:

[EastMids]

I distinctly remember, when I worked for a UK airline based not too far from my user name, preparing grids for each aircraft type that it operated at the time (going back to the days of McDonnell Douglas kit amongst others) showing business class load along the top, economy class load down the side. Finding the appropriate entry in the grid would reveal the seat row number behind which the curtain should be set for any given passenger load combination. Aside from ensuring that the appropriate number of seats was available in each cabin and providing a quick guide to as to where to position the curtain for any given load, I also distinctly remember that another objective was broadly to shoe-horn the economy passengers into as few a number of rows as was feasible, whilst leaving the business class passengers with as much free space as was possible.

[Who'stheDaddy]

An Airlines FMU (flight monitoring unit) or equivalent dept. will normally decide the "configuration" of the cabin by looking at the booked load in all classes during the 24hrs precedeing that particular flight.

As someone mentioned before airlines do try to pen the "y" class altogether leaving "c" pax more space also it was quicker to serve pax and clean aircraft on arrival.

Dispatchers (in the past anyway) used to have the authority to change cabin configs should it aid them in any weight/balance problems - Particularly on regional a/c such as ATR where business and economy class swap ends.

The curtains are normally on rails and are held in place by spring loaded clips - B*gg*rs to moved because the rails bend and corrode and the springs cease up! As others stated earlier seats could be changed manually or electronically - who changes the congig depends entirely on the airline, as ground crew i have done it but i have also seen the cabin staff do it.

WTD

[In trim]

EastMids,

That's the same basic system that many operators used.

The matrix for the airline I used to work for was created based approximately on the number of empty seats, and then setting a config which would put two-thirds of the empty seats in the Business Cabin, and one-third of the empty seats in Economy.

This would give Business pax a lot more space (often 2 seats per pax) whilst Economy pax may only have had 1 spare seat for every 7-10 pax.