These 'Stacked' Plane Seats Could End The Legroom Problem Forever

They're just plane brilliant.

Just when you thought airplane seats had reached their squishiest, someone invents something squishier... but it's also pretty brilliant.

Airbus has filed a patent for a new, double-decker seating arrangement that has passengers literally stacked on top of each other to save space. But it isn't the worst idea. Hear us out!

The way the seats are configured, passengers on both levels can recline their seats until they're pretty much flat. No more legroom squishiness! No more seat recliner wars! You'll just have to deal with "a single stair or ladder" to get to your bunk bed of a seat.

Yeah, it looks squishy in there...

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

...but check out all that recliner space!

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

The patent recommends the design for business class cabins.

Currently, when someone reclines the seat in front of you, there's less distance between you and the other passenger's seat. In this scheme, reclining your seat would actually create more space between your seat and the person in the seat below you. As the patent demonstrates in the figure above, "Movement of its supporting surface (18,20) from the upright seating position into the reclined lying position results in an increase of a distance between the supporting surface (18) of the first seat (12) and the supporting surface (20) of the second seat (14).”

Don't get too excited (or terrified), because you likely won't see these seats on planes anytime soon... or ever. Most Airbus patents remain just ideas on paper, never actually making it into the sky.

"Airbus files some 600 patents each year in order to protect its intellectual property," Airbus Head of Media Stefan Schaffrath told HuffPost in an email. "This doesn't necessarily mean that all of the patents are adopted on an aircraft."

In the case of the "flying donut" seats, this is a very good thing. Airbus also debuted an idea for passenger isolation helmets last year, the likes of which we've yet to see in real life.

Their sleeping box, however, doesn't sound like such a bad idea...

Also on HuffPost:

Best Overall Coach-Class Airline in North America: JetBlue

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