Airbus patents detachable cabin to save boarding time

PanARMENIAN.Net - Considering the amount of time people spend at the airport, Airbus came up with an idea to turn aircraft cabins into what amounts to shipping containers, Wired reports.

Aside from making the magnificently huge A380 and very popular A320, the company’s also offered two of the most questionable seating ideas imaginable: the backless bike-seat half-stand model and what we call the steerage concept that essentially stacks passengers. The people in charge of R&D seem to spend a decent amount of time dreaming up ways to make flying even more hellish, but the latest idea—filed in February 2013 and approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office just yesterday—shifts the focus from seats to the cabin itself.

To reduce a plane’s turn-time, Airbus proposes “a removable cabin module, comprising a floor, an upper aircraft fuselage portion connected to the floor, and a first and a second end wall, wherein the first and second end walls, the floor and the upper aircraft fuselage portion form a cabin for transport of passengers, luggage, freight or combinations thereof.”

In other words, it’s a detachable cabin passengers board while it’s at the gate. Once everyone is seated, the pod is lowered onto the plane. When you arrive at your destination, the cabin is removed, another is added, and the plane takes off. The time it spends on the ground is drastically reduced.

It’s not the craziest idea. If everything in the cabin could be ready and waiting for the pilots when they arrive with the flatbed, as it were, then once the cabin container attached itself you’d be off and running in a jiffy. Airbus has called this the “aircraft pod concept,” saying “passengers could be pre-seated in cabin pods before the plane actually arrives, ready for integration on the aircraft, saving time and making processing much simpler.”