ANA Ups the Ante on 787 Business-Class Cabin

LE BOURGET: All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Safran Seats have unveiled the airline’s planned new Boeing 787-9 business-class cabin seat.

The Room FX (for “Future Experience”) builds on The Room currently incorporated in the carrier’s Boeing 777-300ERs, extensively modified to fit into what ANA describes as the “medium-sized” 787-9. The airline, Safran and UK design agency Acumen Design Associates said the new design will be the world’s largest seat in its class on a mid-sized aircraft.

Whereas in The Room on 777s, passengers sleep at a slight diagonal angle to maximize the bed length, the 787’s The Room FX seat will allow travelers to sleep “in line,” Acumen CEO Ian Dryburgh told ATW.

Compared to the 777 version, “there’s a lot more side furniture. The side table is around 50% bigger. The FX shares in many ways the DNA virtues of The Room, but we’ve tried to elevate the experience,” he said.

The seat has a curved backrest, ANA EVP customer experience Keiji Omae said. “It’s much wider than the existing 787 seat. It’s like sitting on a sofa in your living room.” The new seat is 41.5 in (105 cm wide) and is designed for greater comfort on long-haul flights with 50% thicker seat cushions and twice the cushioning in the lumbar spine area, he said.

“At Safran Seats, we are proud to deepen our long-standing partnership between ANA, Acumen and Safran,” Safran Seats president and CEO Victoria Foy said at the unveiling Tuesday at the Paris Air Show. “The new business-class seat represents a step-change in comfort, versatility and innovative design for the Boeing 787-9.”

Features include thinner privacy doors and walls to deliver what Safran Seats described as contributing to a significant reduction in seat weight; a 24 in. IFE screen that is 1.4 times larger than existing units on ANA’s 787s, plus USB-A and -C wireless charging and Bluetooth audio connectivity.

The new cabin will be in a 1-2-1 configuration and there will be both forward- and aft-facing seats.

ANA will introduce The Room FX on major long-haul international routes on new aircraft from 2026.

ANA has 16 787-9s in its fleet and retrofits of existing aircraft will start in 2027. A date by which the entire fleet will be equipped with the new seat has not yet been decided.

The 787-9s delivered with the new seats will have a three-class configuration: 48 business class, 21 premium economy and 137 economy.

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