BEIJING: Airbus has been coming up with a lot of ideas lately to make air travel more efficient. First there was the bicycle-like seat that has passengers perched on their chairs. And then there was the mezzanine-style seating that stacks fliers on top of each other.
But as Wired reports, this latest idea takes on challenge of faster boarding that centers on “a removable cabin module” that turns airplane cabins into shipping containers.
The Airbus patent, filed in February 2013 and approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office Tuesday, aims to reduce a plane’s turn-time (or time on the ground) with a cabin “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.”
So, it’s like a detachable cabin where passengers can be loaded ahead of time at a gate and then attached to a plane when it arrives. When you land again, the fully loaded cabin is removed (to be emptied at a different location) and replaced by another pre-loaded cabin, Wired reports.
Airbus competitor Boeing predicts that if you can cut down an airplane’s turn-time by 10 minutes, you can improve its utilization level by 8.1 percent–so you can see why it’s a compelling idea.
