#like she actually has good front width and she's trying to be narrow on purpose 😭

[ocala-is-calling]

[haberdashing]

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Jon has an unexpected visitor at the safehouse.

on AO3

There was a knock on the safehouse door.

Jon’s first thought was that it must be Martin at the door, but no, that didn’t make sense, it’d been barely five minutes since he’d left on his walk, he wouldn’t be coming back (coming home) so soon...

The door to the safehouse had a peephole, thankfully, so even without having to use his Eye powers Jon could look through and see who was outside without having to open the door and expose himself to any potential threats in the process.

What Jon saw through the peephole was enough to make him shiver.

Tim was outside.

But... but Tim was dead. They’d found his body after the Unknowing, and even if they hadn’t, he’d been in the epicenter of the explosion, been in the middle of a building that collapsed on top of him...

Alright, so Jon had been there too, but that was different. He knew why he had survived, why death hadn’t claimed him then and there, though it’d taken him six long months to escape entirely from the End’s grasp. Unless Jon was very much mistaken, Tim didn’t have (hadn’t had) the same going for him.

And yet... Jon hadn’t seen (or Seen) it happen, and maybe some part of him had been hoping for this, hoping that a mistake had been made somewhere along the way, hoping that he hadn’t actually lost yet another of his closest companions that easily.

Jon cracked the door open. There was less than a finger’s width of distance between it and the door frame still, but that was enough to let sound in, and to let the cool autumn air in as well.

For one long moment, all was still.

“Jon?”

Tim’s voice was a mix of emotions, anxiety and anger and uncertainty and the softest hint of hope all mixed into one.

And it was definitely Tim’s voice, the same one that had berated him about confusing the names Carla and Clara on the tapes an eternity ago, the same one that had called out to him shortly before pressing the detonator.

“Tim.”

Jon still didn’t quite believe it, logic and instinct fighting in his mind; he wrapped one hand around the door tightly, but he didn’t open it any further.

“Care to let me into your freaky little cabin in the middle of nowhere, or are you just going to stand there and watch me shiver?”

“I...” Jon’s voice trailed off as he realized he had no idea how he was going to continue that sentence. Instead, he opted for another tack entirely, one that saw the line between straightforward and blunt and played hopscotch on it.

“Tim, you’re dead.”

Tim gestured towards his body, which was still covered in worm scars and a handful of others to boot but was very much intact. “Really? Guess I didn’t get the memo.”

“They... they told me you were dead. Said they’d found your body a few days after...”

Jon didn’t finish the sentence, partly because he didn’t want to, partly because he didn’t need to, and partly because Tim’s eyebrows kept rising and his grin kept widening with every word Jon said and if the pace didn’t slow and the words kept coming Tim’s face would smack right into uncanny valley territory.

“Oh, is that what they told you? I’ve been wondering--figured there had to be some kind of cover story, or else you’d have gone off on some slapdash mission looking for me, probably gotten yourself kidnapped again too...”

God, Jon had missed Tim.

“Then...” Jon tapped his fingers against the door, opened it a hair wider. “Then what really happened?”

“Oh, I seduced Elias-”

Jon’s face must have been quite the sight, because Tim rushed to finish his sentence, raising his hands in a gesture of- peace? Supplication?

“-so he’d let me quit, and so I could run off with a ton of the Institute’s cash while I was at it. I think I’m technically on the run from the law now? Anyone asks, my name’s Rodolfo.”

Tim punctuated that last line with a wink and finger guns, and for a brief, beautiful moment it was almost as if none of it had happened, as if they had just started in the archives and the biggest thing he had to worry about was whether he’d made a few mistakes when reading through the statements...

“Be glad to tell you the full story over whatever liquor you’ve got in there?”

Jon wanted to throw open the door and let Tim in and give him as much liquor as he would take, he really did. That sounded like the start of a wonderful evening.

But Jon also was starting to suspect that any time life treated him well, gave him something that seemed too good to be true, it always lead to disappointment and mayhem and everything he cared about unraveling in front of him.

(Except the safehouse, so far. Jon was trying very, very hard not to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.)

And while he’d asked Tim a few questions, Jon had been careful to keep any compulsion out of his voice when he did so, because Tim had made his feelings about Jon’s--how had he phrased it before? “Spooky monster powers”?--well, about Jon’s newfound abilities very clear.

Jon wanted to respect that, but more than that, he needed to be sure.

“Who are you, really?” He kept the compulsion on the light side, at least to start with. No need to overdo it, especially since after the incident with Peter Lukas in the Lonely, he knew the consequences of using his Eye powers to their full potential all too well.

The answer came quick enough. “Someone who hates when you do that.”

Jon’s eyes narrowed. “Not really that specific, there.”

“Do you really have to pull that shit with me?”

“If you know what I’ve been through, you’d know the answer is yes. Now. Are you actually Tim Stoker?” Heavier, this time.

“As much as anyone is, these days.” Tim paused for a moment before adding in a lighter tone, “Besides everyone else who happens to have the same name, but we all know who’d top the list if you ranked all the Tim Stokers in the world, right?”

Jon didn’t respond to Tim’s question, which seemed to be largely rhetorical anyhow, as he was too busy parsing Tim’s initial response. Two awfully roundabout answers in a row there... was Tim just being obtuse (probably on purpose, knowing him), or was something else going on?

Jon was reminded of Helen’s claim that she was as much Helen Robinson as Jon himself still was the Jonathan Sims who’d just been hired by the Magnus Institute... was Tim an avatar now? Of what, then? And could he still be trusted? And if that was all, why didn’t he just admit as much?

Or... or if it wasn’t really Tim, if Tim was as dead as Jon had assumed him to be an hour ago, then anyone, anything, could be as much Tim as anyone “these days”...

One way to settle this for sure. No holding back.

“What is your name?”

Tim grimaced, resisting the pull of compulsion for several long seconds before he finally spat out, “Whatever it needs to be.”

And then Jon realized, and the being that had pretended to be Tim must have seen it in his eyes, because there was a mad rush for the door, Jon pulling his hand away and shoving all his meager weight against it, Tim’s body contorting into a mess of spindly limbs that pressed against the door.

It was perhaps a minor miracle that Jon managed to win that particular battle of tug-of-war, but just before the door closed for good, he heard a distorted mockery of Tim’s voice--or, or not Tim’s voice, not Tim’s real voice anyway, he would have to get some old tapes from the Institute as soon as he could in order to hear that--call out to him in something akin to a stage whisper.

“You’ll never know what he really looked like.”

Then the door was shut, and Jon stood next to it, sweating and panting from exertion, quick heavy breaths gradually growing slower and calmer over time as he set up every lock he could find for the door before sitting down, back pressed against the door just in case.

The door rattled, and Jon jumped up, looking through the peephole before even considering undoing the locks, half-expecting to see that spindly monstrosity that had posed as Tim waiting for him.

Instead, there was only Martin, Martin back from his walk, Martin who didn’t know why the front door of the safehouse (their house) was locked now when it hadn’t been when he’d left...

...or... was it Martin, waiting outside the door for him, or was it really the creature that was not Sasha and not Tim and not Martin either, hoping to fool Jon a second time?

Jon’s hand lingered over the locks on the door for a long time.

[that-heidlebaugh-blog]

Decorative Stamped Concrete Repairs

Here is the first day at this particular workplace. We will put a bigger driveway here. We will remove these bushes in motion. The mailbox had already been moved, so it is already clear that these bushes would come out. Part of this slab that we will cut along this brick. There, everything will remove some of that. Remove the entire aisle, we will widen this path as the palm goes out. All these bushes that you see here come out. The bushes along the house will come out. We are going to make concrete all along this column, on the side of the house from the entrance. They will really be expanded. The bridge passes and everything comes back on a slight radius. We will make a descent radius to the street rather than straight lines, and then we will make a front patio here and it will be a swinging lane radius in about 10 feet wide front patio. We're just going to use a 60-pound electric jackhammer here, break it up. I'm going to do some saw cuts. I have a 12-inch diamond blade on this steel cut-off saw and there is the cut. So we can save some of this slab behind the side of the house. In this way, the whole front will be the same, because what we're going to do here, we're going to have one-foot of stamps, some groups, and they're going to be a random little stone, a stamped concrete on the group, and then in the field. We are going to make another color it will be just a solid, color and it will be a broom finish with some decorative seals now.

What we have is a bobcat with a breaker, it must also be the super 10 happens once I'm a little broken I'll start charging this super 10 - and it looks like the depth of this concrete in the area - certainly a load, the bushes, of course, it's going to go in the dump trailer because it's a green waste, and it's a lot, a lot cheaper to throw as green waste, rather than mixing with the concrete loads recyclable. All the concrete goes up and then it is done in what they use for a road base or any type of base under pavers, especially pavers. It is really popular just under the concrete making it a nice base. You do not need a lot of base in this area, in Southern California, with a conch, not with concrete and rebar, but when you use pavers or things like that, it does not have not really structural value. You will have to put something underneath to keep it there. So, this is the original alley. With this house, about 40 years old very well held, they used a look like a three-quarter-inch rock, probably 2500 psi, we're going to do a 3000 psi. We are going to use the mix of the pump, so there is 3/8 of the rock, but we are going to throw rebar here at 2. Foot centers and we're also going to add fiber mesh in the mix. These two reinforcements do different things. They do not do the same thing. The rebar holds it more of a structural crack.

Fiber is just for shrink cracking and another unwanted substance is useful just for other general purposes I like fiber. For now, we have a nice picture about it. In fact, a landscaper came for this job. The owner was a bit unsure of the design they knew. They wanted to remake the entire yard before they arrived, so I went with a landscaper I worked with. In recent years - and she has developed pretty decent shots - easy to read, we have already removed all the concrete. Now, what we are doing is we are going to start, try to do the layout on the forums and what we are working on is a drawing. It's a 3/8 inch scale and what that means is that not every three eighths of an inchthe plant is a foot, so we have a structural scale rule that is divided into three eight divisions, which is really easy. You can do it with a regular tape measure, just faster and easier with it. If you have the rule, this kind of broken in increments of three eighths of an inch. Here is the new drawing that will look like this. You can see, we have double band running through the driveway. These are just wet joints. A group of feet, which basically goes, will be monolithic, it's the same color and the whole perimeter is going to be a separate floor and it's going to be the little random stone stamp. So we have two poured here and it's stamped concrete and, of course, the field in the middle area. It's just a broomstick out there now tying these two things together is really crucial. These narrow strips, with the aisle as they are not cast at the same time, they actually have a cold seal, which means they are not connected, but we will connect them with speed studs in this particular case. not used any of my videos yet, but in this one it took a lot of troweling. So, instead of having to drill every two feet around the entire perimeter of both sides, we just screwed speed studs inside the shape leaving a hollow place. Concretely, when you take out your shapes, you simply slip your studs into the template. The nails are really beautiful for something like that, they give a little movement, but that prevents it from changing elevation, in other words, lateral movement. You can get with the slippy, but you will not know the vertical movement. Here is the water meter all we had to do some mods here. So I have a tool to turn off the water meters, and that's what they look like. Turn the handle and the water meter is off so you can work on the irrigation system, which is why we, what we were doing there. We closed the main because we had to rework the main entrance of the house.

So, we could make it fall for some watering faucets, it's just something that I do for the landscaper who does the landscaping of what I'm doing just the hard surface. Also in the middle of this driveway, we ran a three-inch pipe. It's a sleeve, basically or a conduit for watering lines, low voltage, lighting or anything you want to go through because there's a lot of space in a 3-inch pipe. Now, I ended up digging this job a little bit. You know it's not real. Pleasant terrain conditions that I recognized quite quickly when I started demonstrating and can see when you arrive in areas that look at other lanes in the area or even look at the street in the area . In this case, I looked at The Street and noticed how cracked the street was and a shape like this and other alleys. I knew there was probably a soil condition here that I will have to destroy, and then I went ahead and gave a plot of about two or three inches of a mixture of sand and rocks. It's basically a rejection and that's what I like to call sand that you do not use in a mortar mix, but you can use it. It's a good base, so it's the rejects, and now that's what they do. What we are doing now is that we are going to try to distance the distance from this planter, but it's between the gangway of the driveway, and you can see, there is a slight curve, and we want to try to build that according to plan. As close as possible, I will evolve this planner in a few places throughout, then I will drive my stakes to this depth, these points and then I will just wrap my arSd she. Now here is the width of the bridge, if you can see with the scale 3/8 there and how it goes down, so it goes from 0 to 1, 1 in increments. So here are the two points of this groove here, then the planners on the left side of this line. It's a good sized walkway for this particular home design. Have you been too wide or too narrow? It really depends on your door. The width and even where your column is located and that's what will determine the size of the gateway that you really want to use. Plus, you know that the size of your yard has a lot to do with that. , Music, it's two feet! Basically just at the end of this planner width to zero. It works in the other direction of the rule, but you go in that direction from left to right. The way this rule is laid, now you are three feet in the middle. You want to ignore 14 and 13, because it's actually the other side of the rule. So, you want to go to 0-2. While 14 is really F.

It's really a 1 going in that direction. You know, here's the folding panel, I use this plastic, a half-inch composite on one side and on the other, I use a quarter inch and it has a masonite membrane on it Inside a plastic wrap, although you can use a lot of different materials, you can use it, and you can achieve the same result with virtually anything that depends on the materials you have or what you have. So here's the opening of your planner, that's what it looks like now. Your stamped concrete strips turn the determination of the width of these and the lengths. Now, the way this drawing draws the tape that runs through the passage is very narrow, as you can see on the back of this ruler, so we zoom in a bit. So when you create groups that are not monolithically filled with the terrain map, you want to keep at least one foot on them, otherwise they will just separate from you because you want to be able to get at least two bars going down. All of these bands - that's what's really going to happen: music. So with this failure of the house, a bit of the house for the other group to start running the other way along the front door. What we will do here is that we are going to pour all the stamp of the band and all the stamp, which is all stamped, small and random, and it will be two-colored, which means that I will have one. with the concrete and the secondary color will be my release for the stamps, then when you do, the key will have a two-color effect. I will use a color herdon this particular project, which means it's a dust, while the concrete is still wet on a type of 50,500 psi. Staining method checking the transverse slope on my bands. Now, if you wanted to be really complicated on something like that, if you said, you were on a gable slope a bit of a hill that you just want to define the two outer perimeter forces, we're in a chain all the way that way, everything would be on a constant slope in one direction, that's all, and you can see a lot of air in these forms. That means it's probably four inches or more. These two by four are actually three and a half inches. So, you see the space under them is more than three and a half years. Now, all the rebar that is going to be cut is going to be four dowels, so we have all the bands set up here.

There are other groups crossing this path. Of course, these are not set up, but we have the group in front of the brick column. We have the group that goes directly to the street, and this particular sidewalk in this street is what It's called a rolled sidewalk. You can see that it is much easier to sink than a typical sidewalk, because you only have two shapes instead of three and you have nothing to do without undressing and getting by with all your hands free. not a lot of thinking when you make those kinds of limits. Here are the speed studs here, so we are aiming for a small adapter, which is reusable. These red plastic sleeves are not reusable. They stay in the concrete, they are hollow and when the form comes off, you fall back on the stamped concrete hampton nh, it will sink the next pour now. You have something that will not collapse. You can even epoxy if you wish, but there is no real need. So here's what we have here: an eighteen-inch group is the entrance to the driveway outside the school. What is it? He is 17 years old, a quarter. So, it is about three quarters of an inch thick. Now we have to measure a lot of these streets in a small radius, so you want to measure just about everything. Every issue to make sure you follow the street radius here, we will do meanwhile we can not use plastic dials there because it is already fired. That means we had an exercise to get rebar in those places. Now we use the speed fasteners, which means that these wires are pre-cut to four six or eight inches and the size of the rebars you have, you will use 4 inches. Speed-Dials is enough for a couple of 3/8 bars now a good Buster rebar will laugh at your use on those little wires with these pre-cut wire loops and they'll actually tie yeah just with a roll of wire on a belt but it's nice for beginners using these loops. If you do not, do it a lot? Another interesting thing about using buckles is: if you have an air tire on your barrel, you roll on it. You will not get a puncture on your wheel, the wheelbarrow. So if you use the roll of wire and you twist and cut, there are a lot of little claws, by placing yourself that you might have a tire flat in your wheel, wheelbarrow, here is a sewer cleaning what we have to do . We will put a nice removable brass cap on this one that will flush out the coffee. So, all you will see is the brass cap. Well, it takes a few screws to remove it, but that's about it and it's your ABS glue. These are three inches mm. The reason there are two, the way it works, one of the thoseleaning goes to the direction of the house. He has one that you know he sweeps yeah, he has a sweep.

One of them on one of these amounts has a sweep towards a house. The other has a sweep towards the street. So if you run a snake in one or the other depending on which direction you want to go, that's it. Why are there two together? They make sweet teas that go both ways, but they are not as beautiful as making individual pipes with long sweeps. So we had to make a small modification on these fittings because the pipe Heights is nice, the plumbing in the concrete like that once the concrete turned, nothing will move again if you have glue or not. It's okay. Get out when the car goes around it, so that's access and after, the small brass fittings will bypass those that will lead to the top of the patio. So, everything you see out there will be hidden under concrete heights right now is not really crucial because you have a little game with your brass necklace. It will work around that. This gives you the path, I will probably up to about an inch of adjustment on your brass necklace. It will be around that, so get them together and that's about it. And then you can do your adjustment with youradjustable nuts on the collar. Now, these must not be really tight. You want to make them so easy to remove if you need them in the future, so we put them together. Maybe a little slow transverse slope, here is the small front patio! We surround him right next to the front door and since then we maintain love. There was a lot of cross slope of the door to the right. Porch, as we approached the level along the facade, we had to make a thickened edge. So many times where I'm in those situations where the existing quality platform is tilted rather than adding topsoil.

[touristguidebuzz]

Designing an Airline Seat From Scratch Is Not as Easy as it Looks

Lift by EnCore is creating new coach seats. A lot goes into designing new seats, including crash testing. EnCore

Skift Take: Building a coach airline seat is not like creating home furniture. Building stuff for aircraft is remarkably complicated. We got an inside look recently at the production center for an aircraft seat maker. Here's some of what we learned.

— Brian Sumers

When EnCore, a company that makes components for aircraft interiors, including galleys, which might cost $300,000 per plane, set out to build coach seats, it didn’t try to disrupt the industry by creating the world’s most innovative product.

It could have — its employees have the technological acumen— but airlines are risk-averse, and most want versions of what they’ve always had. For its new segment, called Lift by EnCore, the company went simple, promising a functional seat that will be comfortable for passengers but thin enough to satisfy requests from some discount carriers seeking to install as many seats as possible.

Encore is new to the market, but it has a competitive advantage. Last year, Boeing said Lift would create its preferred seat for new 737s. Airlines can choose other seats, but these will be the only ones designed to complement the aircraft’s signature “Sky Interior,” with its blue LED lighting simulating the sky.

“Boeing spends so much time and effort in the Boeing Sky Interior and thinking about perception of space and perception of in-flight comfort, but the big missing piece for them is they had no influence over the seat, which is such a big piece of passenger experience — the thing you actually sit it,” said Elijah Dobrusin, Lift’s vice president for development & strategy.

Lift has signed up India’s SpiceJet and two European customers, neither of which it will name. The company’s Huntington Beach, California production center is already churning out seats, with the first ones expected to fly by late next year. Lift is also creating a 787 seat, though it has no customers.

Boeing is working with Lift in part because it wanted to give airlines a seating option likely to be completed on time and on budget. Some of Lift’s competitors, including France’s Zodiac Aerospace, have had trouble meeting contractual requirements to airlines, and when seats are not ready, Boeing must store the airplanes until delivery.

“We believe our customers would benefit from a wider range of options and more reliable, on-time performance in the interiors and seating market,” Blake Emery, director of differentiation strategy for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said in an email.

We spent some time recently at Lift’s headquarters. Here is some of what we learned.

This is a rendering of Lift’s proposed 737 seat. It is slim, like most other seats on the market.

MAKING MICRO-IMPROVEMENTS

Lift designers say most of today’s seats are about as effective in possible, because they’re an efficient use of space. That makes them hard to disrupt.

“We’ve found a really good ratio to weight, to cost, and to comfort,” said Tom Eaton, Lift’s director of design. “If you change something, you can make something more comfortable but you probably lose out if something else becomes heavier or it becomes too costly.”

Since Lift couldn’t make its seats more plush, or add leg rests, it sought smaller improvements. One is a mobile device holder Eaton promises will snugly hold devices, like an iPad, so passengers can watch movies and other content. Other manufacturers make them too, but Eaton said passengers sometimes fear the holders will cause their devices to, “fall off or rip apart.”

Perhaps Lift’s biggest advance is the armrest. Often, they’re two inches wide, but Lift’s will be 1.6 inches. Lift will use the extra space to make seats slightly wider — a better use of limited room. Generally, Boeing 737 seats are narrower than on the similar Airbus 320, because the Airbus has a wider fuselage. This will close that gap, possibly making it imperceptible to travelers.

“Even though seat width is not a key predictor of overall flight satisfaction, it is a good idea to ‎get as much seat width as a given fuselage cross section will allow,” Boeing’s Emery said.

While researching seats, Eaton said Lift’s team discovered standard-sized armrests make little sense, because they’re wider than required for one person, and too narrow for two to share.

“After a while, you start to think, ‘We’re not really benefiting from the two-inch wide armrest,'” Eaton said. “This idea is that it can never be shared. It’s only one person’s arm rest.”

Lift chose 1.6 inches based on trial and error.

“We found the sweet spot for something to be wide enough to be comfortable, and yet narrow enough to give the benefits of passenger space,” Eaton said.

Lift’s proposed Boeing 787 cabin. It’s not always easy to decide where the screens should go, because they must be accessible to the tallest and shortest passengers.

SEATS DESIGNED FOR EVERYONE

What makes seat design so vexing is that the product must work for all passengers. Lift is designing seats to accommodate everyone from a woman in the fifth percentile — she’s roughly 4-foot-10 — to a man in the 95th, who stands about 6-feet-7, according to Eaton.

“It’s what differentiates an aircraft seat from domestic furniture or a car seat or from everything else you know,” Eaton said. “The seat can’t move to accommodate those different people.”

Designers must decide how high to place the seat from the floor, ensuring tall passengers are comfortable while shorter passengers won’t dangle their legs. On planes with in-seat entertainment screens, designers must determine where to place them so all passengers have a good view. Designers may also struggle with deciding where to put tray tables, and where to place power outlets.

Technology could solve some problems, allowing seats to move depending on a passenger’s size. But no one wants to make an economy class seat too complicated.

“All this stuff could be solved with more moving mechanisms and making the seat more complex,” Dobrusin said. “But that adds weight, that adds cost, and pretty much everything that moves is going to break, right? We try to make the seat as simple as possible while still achieving those goals of comfort and amenities.”

RUDIMENTARY FOCUS GROUPS

Occasionally, Lift will put an advertisement on Craigslist and offer $50 to people to sit in a seat for an hour or less.

One time, after tall people complained about seat comfort, Lift hired the biggest people it could find. The employees watched a handful of people sit in the seats, while taking photographs.

“We had them sit down, go into recline,” Eaton said. “We watched them go through and put the tray table down and act like they’re reaching and multi-tasking.”

The team soon discovered the problem.

“It was because their shins were hitting particular places we couldn’t simulate,” Dobrusin said. “We have comfort dummies, and we would stick the dummies in the seat and we’re like, ‘Oh, it looks good.’ And we all sat in it, but none of us were 6-foot-7 and 300 pounds.”

Lift made some adjustments that should make taller people more comfortable. But since some airlines might install seats with 28-inch pitch — the distance between one place on a seat and the same place on the seat in front of it — taller passengers may want to temper expectations.

“It’s about making the most of the situation you have,” Eaton said. “Often you can actually do quite a lot. You’d be surprised. You think, the space is the space and that’s it, but when you start to make minor adjustments to this and that, you’re going to actually change somebody’s perception of comfort really quickly.”

PEOPLE abuse AIRPLANE SEATS

A Boeing 737-900 may fly four legs per day, and with that many people flying, some travelers will abuse seats — on purpose, or by mistake. That means Lift must design nearly indestructible seats.

“A lot of people believe, because they’ve paid for it, that they can do whatever they want to it,” Dobrusin said. “They can step on it, they can try to break it, or they can take off pieces of it and steal it, which is absurd. People literally steal whatever thing is removable.”

Sometimes, he said, passengers try to take seat belts and turn them into belts for pants. One of Dobrusin’s employers once “put a security lock on the seatbelt because before, you could unclip them,” he said.

LESS PADDING

Recently, airlines have preferred thinner seats, allowing them to put more passengers in the same space.

Passengers often complain, but Dobrusin and Eaton argue new seats don’t have to be less comfortable. Lift’s seats are thin, but the two executives say the seats won’t be less comfortable than plush coach cabins of yesteryear.

“In the past, people always looked to try to sell the seat on comfort — that immediate impression of comfort — so they would overly pad it and use softer cushions,” Eaton said.

“And so if somebody sits in, you sink in, and immediately you think, ‘Wow this is amazing.’ But actually over the course of a flight, that can lead to a really uncomfortable journey if your body’s not supported,” he said. “Today, I think everybody understands that you need to develop an ergonomic seatback that supports your body in the correct way.”

Eaton noted office chairs once had inches of padding, but today many are sleeker, with only mesh supporting a worker’s back. “These office chairs are great for a couple of hours, or even longer,” Eaton said. “It just shows you what you can get from a relatively thin panel.”

Yes, airlines want to fit more seats, but they’re still focused on ergonomics. “The last thing they want is a second-rate product,” Eaton said.

CONCEPT SEATS not VIABLE

Over the years, rival manufacturers have created concept seats they promise will give passengers extra room. In one, some seats face forward, while others face backward. In another, seats in the same row are slightly staggered so each passenger has more personal space.

But no airline has adopted the configurations, and Lift has no interest in them. Passengers often view them as too dense, even when they might be more travel-friendly than current configurations, Eaton said.

“From a designer’s perspective, I looked at them, and it was always done for the passenger’s benefit,” he said. “We looked at how to create more shoulder space, more leg space. But from a passenger’s perspective, they see it as just a way of cramming in more people.”

The forward-backward seating has more problems, he said, because some passengers must face each other. “People feel very uncomfortable when they’re put quite close into social contact with each other,” he said.

Eaton said he expect airlines will install traditional seating plans for the foreseeable future.

“We’re learning to focus more on the micro improvements than the macro,” he said. “I don’t think we’re focused on flipping people around anymore, but I think there are going to be ways that we can create marginal gains in terms of space and comfort. But they’re going to be incremental and small.”

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Designing an Airline Seat From Scratch Is Not as Easy as it Looks

Lift by EnCore is creating new coach seats. A lot goes into designing new seats, including crash testing. EnCore

Skift Take: Building a coach airline seat is not like creating home furniture. Building stuff for aircraft is remarkably complicated. We got an inside look recently at the production center for an aircraft seat maker. Here's some of what we learned.

— Brian Sumers

When EnCore, a company that makes components for aircraft interiors, including galleys, which might cost $300,000 per plane, set out to build coach seats, it didn’t try to disrupt the industry by creating the world’s most innovative product.

It could have — its employees have the technological acumen— but airlines are risk-averse, and most want versions of what they’ve always had. For its new segment, called Lift by EnCore, the company went simple, promising a functional seat that will be comfortable for passengers but thin enough to satisfy requests from some discount carriers seeking to install as many seats as possible.

Encore is new to the market, but it has a competitive advantage. Last year, Boeing said Lift would create its preferred seat for new 737s. Airlines can choose other seats, but these will be the only ones designed to complement the aircraft’s signature “Sky Interior,” with its blue LED lighting simulating the sky.

“Boeing spends so much time and effort in the Boeing Sky Interior and thinking about perception of space and perception of in-flight comfort, but the big missing piece for them is they had no influence over the seat, which is such a big piece of passenger experience — the thing you actually sit it,” said Elijah Dobrusin, Lift’s vice president for development & strategy.

Lift has signed up India’s SpiceJet and two European customers, neither of which it will name. The company’s Huntington Beach, California production center is already churning out seats, with the first ones expected to fly by late next year. Lift is also creating a 787 seat, though it has no customers.

Boeing is working with Lift in part because it wanted to give airlines a seating option likely to be completed on time and on budget. Some of Lift’s competitors, including France’s Zodiac Aerospace, have had trouble meeting contractual requirements to airlines, and when seats are not ready, Boeing must store the airplanes until delivery.

“We believe our customers would benefit from a wider range of options and more reliable, on-time performance in the interiors and seating market,” Blake Emery, director of differentiation strategy for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said in an email.

We spent some time recently at Lift’s headquarters. Here is some of what we learned.

This is a rendering of Lift’s proposed 737 seat. It is slim, like most other seats on the market.

MAKING MICRO-IMPROVEMENTS

Lift designers say most of today’s seats are about as effective in possible, because they’re an efficient use of space. That makes them hard to disrupt.

“We’ve found a really good ratio to weight, to cost, and to comfort,” said Tom Eaton, Lift’s director of design. “If you change something, you can make something more comfortable but you probably lose out if something else becomes heavier or it becomes too costly.”

Since Lift couldn’t make its seats more plush, or add leg rests, it sought smaller improvements. One is a mobile device holder Eaton promises will snugly hold devices, like an iPad, so passengers can watch movies and other content. Other manufacturers make them too, but Eaton said passengers sometimes fear the holders will cause their devices to, “fall off or rip apart.”

Perhaps Lift’s biggest advance is the armrest. Often, they’re two inches wide, but Lift’s will be 1.6 inches. Lift will use the extra space to make seats slightly wider — a better use of limited room. Generally, Boeing 737 seats are narrower than on the similar Airbus 320, because the Airbus has a wider fuselage. This will close that gap, possibly making it imperceptible to travelers.

“Even though seat width is not a key predictor of overall flight satisfaction, it is a good idea to ‎get as much seat width as a given fuselage cross section will allow,” Boeing’s Emery said.

While researching seats, Eaton said Lift’s team discovered standard-sized armrests make little sense, because they’re wider than required for one person, and too narrow for two to share.

“After a while, you start to think, ‘We’re not really benefiting from the two-inch wide armrest,'” Eaton said. “This idea is that it can never be shared. It’s only one person’s arm rest.”

Lift chose 1.6 inches based on trial and error.

“We found the sweet spot for something to be wide enough to be comfortable, and yet narrow enough to give the benefits of passenger space,” Eaton said.

Lift’s proposed Boeing 787 cabin. It’s not always easy to decide where the screens should go, because they must be accessible to the tallest and shortest passengers.

SEATS DESIGNED FOR EVERYONE

What makes seat design so vexing is that the product must work for all passengers. Lift is designing seats to accommodate everyone from a woman in the fifth percentile — she’s roughly 4-foot-10 — to a man in the 95th, who stands about 6-feet-7, according to Eaton.

“It’s what differentiates an aircraft seat from domestic furniture or a car seat or from everything else you know,” Eaton said. “The seat can’t move to accommodate those different people.”

Designers must decide how high to place the seat from the floor, ensuring tall passengers are comfortable while shorter passengers won’t dangle their legs. On planes with in-seat entertainment screens, designers must determine where to place them so all passengers have a good view. Designers may also struggle with deciding where to put tray tables, and where to place power outlets.

Technology could solve some problems, allowing seats to move depending on a passenger’s size. But no one wants to make an economy class seat too complicated.

“All this stuff could be solved with more moving mechanisms and making the seat more complex,” Dobrusin said. “But that adds weight, that adds cost, and pretty much everything that moves is going to break, right? We try to make the seat as simple as possible while still achieving those goals of comfort and amenities.”

RUDIMENTARY FOCUS GROUPS

Occasionally, Lift will put an advertisement on Craigslist and offer $50 to people to sit in a seat for an hour or less.

One time, after tall people complained about seat comfort, Lift hired the biggest people it could find. The employees watched a handful of people sit in the seats, while taking photographs.

“We had them sit down, go into recline,” Eaton said. “We watched them go through and put the tray table down and act like they’re reaching and multi-tasking.”

The team soon discovered the problem.

“It was because their shins were hitting particular places we couldn’t simulate,” Dobrusin said. “We have comfort dummies, and we would stick the dummies in the seat and we’re like, ‘Oh, it looks good.’ And we all sat in it, but none of us were 6-foot-7 and 300 pounds.”

Lift made some adjustments that should make taller people more comfortable. But since some airlines might install seats with 28-inch pitch — the distance between one place on a seat and the same place on the seat in front of it — taller passengers may want to temper expectations.

“It’s about making the most of the situation you have,” Eaton said. “Often you can actually do quite a lot. You’d be surprised. You think, the space is the space and that’s it, but when you start to make minor adjustments to this and that, you’re going to actually change somebody’s perception of comfort really quickly.”

PEOPLE abuse AIRPLANE SEATS

A Boeing 737-900 may fly four legs per day, and with that many people flying, some travelers will abuse seats — on purpose, or by mistake. That means Lift must design nearly indestructible seats.

“A lot of people believe, because they’ve paid for it, that they can do whatever they want to it,” Dobrusin said. “They can step on it, they can try to break it, or they can take off pieces of it and steal it, which is absurd. People literally steal whatever thing is removable.”

Sometimes, he said, passengers try to take seat belts and turn them into belts for pants. One of Dobrusin’s employers once “put a security lock on the seatbelt because before, you could unclip them,” he said.

LESS PADDING

Recently, airlines have preferred thinner seats, allowing them to put more passengers in the same space.

Passengers often complain, but Dobrusin and Eaton argue new seats don’t have to be less comfortable. Lift’s seats are thin, but the two executives say the seats won’t be less comfortable than plush coach cabins of yesteryear.

“In the past, people always looked to try to sell the seat on comfort — that immediate impression of comfort — so they would overly pad it and use softer cushions,” Eaton said.

“And so if somebody sits in, you sink in, and immediately you think, ‘Wow this is amazing.’ But actually over the course of a flight, that can lead to a really uncomfortable journey if your body’s not supported,” he said. “Today, I think everybody understands that you need to develop an ergonomic seatback that supports your body in the correct way.”

Eaton noted office chairs once had inches of padding, but today many are sleeker, with only mesh supporting a worker’s back. “These office chairs are great for a couple of hours, or even longer,” Eaton said. “It just shows you what you can get from a relatively thin panel.”

Yes, airlines want to fit more seats, but they’re still focused on ergonomics. “The last thing they want is a second-rate product,” Eaton said.

CONCEPT SEATS not VIABLE

Over the years, rival manufacturers have created concept seats they promise will give passengers extra room. In one, some seats face forward, while others face backward. In another, seats in the same row are slightly staggered so each passenger has more personal space.

But no airline has adopted the configurations, and Lift has no interest in them. Passengers often view them as too dense, even when they might be more travel-friendly than current configurations, Eaton said.

“From a designer’s perspective, I looked at them, and it was always done for the passenger’s benefit,” he said. “We looked at how to create more shoulder space, more leg space. But from a passenger’s perspective, they see it as just a way of cramming in more people.”

The forward-backward seating has more problems, he said, because some passengers must face each other. “People feel very uncomfortable when they’re put quite close into social contact with each other,” he said.

Eaton said he expect airlines will install traditional seating plans for the foreseeable future.

“We’re learning to focus more on the micro improvements than the macro,” he said. “I don’t think we’re focused on flipping people around anymore, but I think there are going to be ways that we can create marginal gains in terms of space and comfort. But they’re going to be incremental and small.”