Parâmetros para o projeto de poltronas aeronáuticas : revisão da literatura e as práticas da indústria no setor de transportes

Abstract

The comfort issue has gained increasing relevance in aircraft cabin projects, and has become a key variable in studies of passengers propensity to take flights as well as an advantage in a competitive market. Among different variables that can influence the passengers comfort perception, those concerning the seats seem to have great relevance. The initial aim of this research was to define the parameters of aircraft seat designs and compare them to the currently used. The literature review on seat parameters showed some results that confronted the data collected in our research. It also showed that the aviation industry lacks a complete understanding of usage of these parameters, once simply having the knowledge about the project parameters does not make them "ergonomic", especially because this condition depends on the interaction between the user and the object in a situation of usage. This research also aimed to study the practices currently used by the transport industry in terms of integrating ergonomic aspects and comfort to the product development process. In order to accomplish that, a benchmark took place in five different seat manufacturers for different means of transportation, highlighting common concepts, methods and tools, with special attention to how the companies analyze user seat usage as a project tool. The results showed that the concepts of ergonomics and passenger comfort adopted by most companies are, in fact, defined by the manufacuters. That means that the manufacturers limit themselves to following the standard requirements, measures, and anthropometric data when developing the project. Some companies develop daily analysis based on ethnographic and field research with future passengers to design their products, but this matter is still incipient. This research also observed that Pressure Mapping is a tool widely used to analyze user comfort issues. Anthropometric data is also an important tool for designing seats, usually scaled from the H point with the aid of a three-dimensional dummy. Above all, it was observed that the issue of passenger comfort does not seem to be more important than other factors, such as cost and safety issues. In addition to the benchmark, a pilot experiment was filmed during a flight to test new ideas and to develop a better method regarding passenger comfort based on the analysis of passenger seat usage in real situations, opening the door for future researches on these issues.