Cathay Pacific
The Brief
To create a full size set of Business and First Class seats for the interior of a 747 aircraft.
In detail
Foley Technologies had originally worked on the concept of the seats for the Cathay Pacific 747 and created mock ups which had been approved and signed off for production.
Cathay Pacific then came back to us after full-scale production of the seats had fallen behind schedule and asked us to produce a full set of seats for the interior of a 747 along with a 5 star galley and toilet. The seats had to be perfect working replicas of the final product, which meant luxury individual pods designed with a 5 star hotel aesthetic in mind.
They had to be tough enough to withstand repeated simulations of full long haul flights complete with air staff, passengers, food and drink. They had to be installed inside a full-sized aircraft interior built within the open plan space of the 5th floor of the Cathay Pacific building in Hong Kong.
All of this had to be done within 3 months.
Challenges
Throughout this process the brief was constantly changing, so we had to adapt in order to create the galley area of the plane, as well as storage units and toilet facilities. In addition to the changing nature of the brief we had to deal with the fact that, unlike the actual manufacturers, the truncated time frame meant that we couldn’t build the seats around aluminium frames.
How we did it
We started by designing the tools to make the component parts of the seating units. Having designed the tools we then made the parts themselves, utilising vacuum forming rapid prototyping and other moulding techniques. These were then trimmed and the technique on how to bond and assemble finalised. The assembled seating pods were disassembled and shipped to Hong Kong, where we re-assembled. We then spent 3 weeks installing them in the Cathay Pacific building.
The result
We delivered the fully fitted and functioning aircraft interior within the deadline, although this meant working around the clock for the final 2 weeks of manufacturing and then spending 3 weeks installing the aircraft interior within the Cathay Pacific building.
From original concept through to the finished interior, via tool design, part manufacturing, trimming and bonding, Foley Technologies was responsible for delivering a complex, bespoke and highly specialised project to an extremely tight deadline. We did this by utilising the existing expertise of our team and by devising new solutions to problems - such as bonding a range of different materials - as they arose. Thanks to our efforts the air-crew of Cathay Pacific were able to work with the plane interior prior to manufacture, honing not only service delivery but also safety aspects.
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