An Empirical Study of Aircraft Passenger’s Comfort

Commercial aviation is the most global of businesses with more than 60% growth over the last ten years. Despite the impressive growing demand, airlines are still one of the lowest-scoring industries in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Since aircraft seat is rated as the most unsatisfying aspect of flying, improving sitting comfort can provide a concrete opportunity for airlines to improve customer's satisfaction and loyalty and thus gain competitive edge in aircraft industry. In the specialized literature, the debate about how define and evaluate seat comfort is still open, but the subjective nature of the comfort experience is universally recognized, thus any comfort analysis cannot disregard subjective methods (‘directly asking people about how comfortable they are’), which can be regarded as the most direct way to detect subjective feelings of comfort and/or discomfort. This paper illustrates an industrial case study aiming at assessing and improving the comfort of aircraft seats designed for regional flights. Subjective evaluations about seating comfort were collected during laboratory experiments involving a group of frequent flyers and a team of experts of aircraft seat design. Data have been analysed adopting the framework of generalized mixture models with uncertainty which focus on the data generating process as mainly composed of two factors: an attraction (positive or negative) towards the evaluated item (i.e. feeling component) and an inherent indecision which surrounds any human choice (i.e. uncertainty component). Following this approach subjective comfort responses have been modelled as a mixture of feeling and uncertainty relating both components to seat design features and passenger anthropometrical characteristics and feelings.