Car seating specialist Adient is waiting on regulatory approvals so it can begin its aircraft seating joint venture (JV) with Boeing.
In January, the company announced its entry into the aviation industry through a joint venture with Boeing. Adient will hold 50.01% of the JV, with Boeing taking the remaining 49.99% stake.
Adient produces seats for around one third of all cars, making it the largest player in the automotive seating sector, Adient VP innovation & design-seating Richard Chung said, speaking April 9 at the Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg, Germany.
“We are going through the approval by the various governments for us to practice as a new company,” Chung said. Clearances are expected over the next few months.
Adient is entering the aircraft seating market because the company believes it can offer a more comfortable product, compared with current suppliers, with stricter time discipline.
“Boeing and Airbus have been having problems with seat suppliers not being accommodating and not delivering on time. In our industry, if we don’t deliver 99.9% of the time to customer’s plants, we won’t have the business. For us, time is golden. We want to bring that into airline industry,” Chung said.
“Comfort is also something we can bring to the party, enhancing the passenger experience. When we look at all the seats in the airline industry, we think we can do better. We think there’s more we can do [and] we think there’s some room there.”
Boeing first announced it was exploring the idea of an aircraft seating partnership with Adient at the April 2017 Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX). At the time, Boeing Commercial Airplanes seat/IFEC team director Alan Wittman told media that Adient had the potential to deliver more choice and value for the aircraft seating segment.
The companies have not disclosed which aircraft types or cabin class they will target, or when their initial designs might go public.
Boeing has been working with new companies, like Adient and LIFT by EnCore, over the last three or four years to develop new partnerships for line-fit seats.
Adient Aerospace’s operational headquarters, technology center and initial production plant will be in Kaiserslautern, Germany, near Frankfurt. The JV’s initial customer service center will be based in Seattle.
Victoria Moores victoria.moores@informa.com
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