The Wild Concept To Fix Air Travel By Stacking Passengers On Top Of Each Other Is Back, And Somehow Slightly More Reasonable

If you’ve flown economy in a modern airliner, you’re acutely aware of how small plane seats are. You get a sliver of space on a seat that’s built primarily to be lightweight and safe, not comfortable. But what if it could be both? One engineer thinks he has the solution. This is the Chaise Longue, and it seeks to give space back by stacking economy class passengers on top of each other in a single-deck airliner. After taking criticism from the public and the media, the creator of the Chaise Longue fixed some issues. Now the final boss of crazy ideas to fix airline travel is back, and it’s still seriously being pitched to airlines.

If the Chaise Longue – not “Lounge,” as you might expect – seems familiar to you, it’s because I wrote about it last year. The seat’s inventor, Alejandro Núñez Vicente, has been touting the double-decker airliner seat since he pitched it as a college project in 2021. In 2022, he built a prototype and then started marketing it as a serious deal. The Internet didn’t really respond kindly to Núñez Vicente’s seat. There were plenty of jokes about human tailpipe emissions wafting down from the upper seats, and other jokes about airlines treating passengers like cargo.

But there were legitimate concerns about the seat, too. I pointed out that a challenge of the Chaise Longue was permitting the safe evacuation of an aircraft in 90 seconds. Others said that the lower seats appear to be poor places for people with claustrophobia, while the seat design in general seems to ignore the existence of people with limited mobility.

Well, Núñez Vicente says he’s fixed this and more with the latest version of the Chaise Longue. He’s hoping that, one day, you’ll ride in one of these things in an Airbus A350 or a Boeing 777X.

One Man’s Solution To Tiny Seats

An unfortunate reality of air travel today is that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t really regulate comfort. Airline passenger advocate groups have been fighting for bigger seats in economy class for years, and their demands have been largely ignored. Even when the FAA asks for comments about seat size, it’s purely on the basis of safety, not comfort. A park bench would be fine in the FAA’s eyes so long as it meets safety standards.

Some inventors have offered their own solutions. If aviation authorities aren’t going to demand that seats get bigger, maybe someone can design a seat that gives passengers more room while pleasing airlines. That’s where the Chaise Longue comes in. If this is your first time seeing the Chaise Longue, I’ll bring you up to speed, because it’s technically been around for a while. Here’s what I wrote in my previous report:

In 2021, Alejandro was a 21-year-old student attending TU Delft University in the Netherlands. At the time, the seats were called the Chaise Longue Economy Seat Project and it made the shortlist for Judges’ Choice for that year’s Crystal Cabin Awards. According to CNN, Alejandro used to travel around the world and one thing stuck out as being particularly painful. He hated how the seats of today lacked legroom. He figured that if only the seats in front of them were higher up, he could actually spread his legs out. So that’s what he did. Alejandro drew up the Chaise Longue, a double-decker airline seat design made for any medium to large aircraft.

Here’s how the Chaise Longue works. An aircraft being outfitted with Chaise Longue seating would delete all overhead bins near the seats. Doing so will allow Chaise Longues to fit. Then, passengers will have to choose seats based on what they’re looking for. If they want maximum recline, they’ll have to climb up into the upper rows. If they want to relax and stretch their legs out with maximum legroom, you choose the lower seats. Both levels have better recline than planes have now, but those on the upper level have the greatest recline of the two choices.

In terms of baggage, your personal items should fit in the included storage, but you’ll have to check your carry-on. Alejandro also pitched the idea as being pandemic-safe, as he believed placing people at different levels would be “more suitable for flights in pandemic times.”

While Núñez Vicente has presented the Chaise Longue as a way to increase space on a per-passenger basis, he added a sweetener for the airlines. In his eyes, if an airline commits to Chaise Longues, they’d be able to fit more passengers in a plane, and thus generate a greater profit.

Take Two

Unfortunately for Núñez Vicente, while the Chaise Longue went viral, it didn’t really land with the public. CNN Travel wrote about the original Chaise Longue prototype in 2022 and then the updated version in 2023. In both instances, the publication’s tester and other travelers expressed concerns about claustrophobia. Much of the Internet, including our own comments, chastised the Chaise Longue as an attempt to cram even more people into a plane, therefore making travel worse, not better.

The 2023 version had replaced the old version’s ladders with stairs to reach the upper level. It also had a dedicated place for lower-level passengers to place their personal items. Like the original iteration, every passenger sitting in the updated Chaise Longue would have to check their carry-on, as overhead bin space would be deleted entirely.

In 2025, the Chaise Longue appeared in the news again because, amazingly, the project got interest from Airbus. That didn’t solve any of the complaints, however. You might have noticed that the lower seat passenger’s head is about level with the butt of the upper seat passenger. This caused endless jokes about passengers passing gas. Speaking to USA Today, Núñez Vicente didn’t totally dismiss that possibility:

“The idea is that there will be some kind of restraint here,” he said, pointing to the partition behind the upper level of seats. If a passenger passed gas “it wouldn’t go straight through,” unless it were especially forceful.

My biggest concern with the Chaise Longue is safety. As I said earlier, the FAA is adamant that an aircraft has to be evacuated within 90 seconds in an emergency. In theory, the Chaise Longue adds more people to the equation, and then forces those people to either crawl out of a hobbit hole or jump down from an upper level. Airliners have to carry enough cabin crew for the number of passengers onboard. The aircraft also needs facilities, exit doors, and food stores to support the number of passengers onboard.

If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the FAA has regulations to prevent head injuries in case of emergency aircraft maneuvers and other intense situations. Likewise, aircraft seats have to be able to withstand 16g of forward acceleration. All of these regulations are publicly available, and there’s even some math in these rules:

Núñez Vicente has yet to prove that his seat design will be anything resembling compliant with regulations. I also wonder how these seats would work during a fire emergency. Will passengers be able to escape the upper row during a fire that’s producing heavy smoke?

The Final Boss Of Double-Decker Seating

Yet, there’s a new version of the Chaise Longue for 2026 that Núñez Vicente is calling the “ultimate, final statement” of his idea. This Chaise Longue went on display at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Germany, earlier this month.

The biggest change with the new version of the Chaise Longue is that the lower-level seats now have a pretty decent gap between the seat and the upper level in front of them. Indeed, this version appears to eliminate many of the claustrophobia concerns. The new seat design also puts some distance between you and the butt of the person in front of you.

Núñez Vicente says that the seat pitch – the distance between the seats – is far enough apart that a lower-level passenger can actually stand up and do stretches in their row. The new Chaise Longue also has larger side panels for greater privacy and a reduced chance of someone in the upper row dropping something on someone in the lower row. The new version also eliminates the possibility of passengers propping their feet up on the walls.

The stairs that lead to the second level have also been widened. Upstairs, the seats have 12 inches of recline, or about twice the recline of the average premium economy seat. Downstairs, there’s technically enough room for the middle seat to recline flat.

Núñez Vicente also says he added a wheelchair-accessible front row to the Chaise Longue. However, this feature is not new. He was advertising this feature last year, and one of the images is embedded in this post. For everyone else, the bottom row is more accessible than previous versions, which is great. But the seats still aren’t compliant for people with disabilities.

Núñez Vicente doesn’t really address regulations, either. There’s no explanation about how aircraft evacuation would work, or how the seats would hold up to impact forces. Weirdly, he’s also had to move the goalpost. When Núñez Vicente launched this endeavor, it was supposed to revolutionize economy class. However, in adding more space to the Chaise Longue, it’s not really compatible with economy class anymore. Now, he’s hoping for the Chaise Longue to be a revolution of premium economy. From CNN:

“But we have been moving the concept towards more of a premium economy experience,” says Núñez Vicente. “We have met directly with airlines and airline executives, CEOs and their customer experience departments, and they told us exactly what they wanted — and they wanted this seat to be something more than just economy.”

[…]

“In this day and age, with this industry and airlines, they are not going to give passengers in the economy more space — it’s going to lean more towards premium economy, and that’s what we have seen,” says Núñez Vicente.

The new version of the Chaise Longue has been subjected to testing by 150 passengers. According to Simply Flying, the results of the test were that passengers thought the lower row was the best, and that both rows were better than premium economy. Reportedly, those same testers thought the lower row was comparable to business class, and that 90 percent of the participants would pay twice as much as an economy ticket to ride in the lower Chaise Longue. Of course, 150 people are a small sample size.

Núñez Vicente hopes that if the Chaise Longue is successful in premium economy, maybe he could do the economy seat version again at a different date. The only problem is that, while he might have chatted with airlines and even got some interest from Airbus, no airline, supplier, or airframer has committed to even buying the Chaise Longue. The seat still has to be certified, and even if it were market-ready, it would not be a cheap expenditure to gut an aircraft’s seats and overhead bins to plop Chaise Longues down in them. Airlines are infamously cheap businesses, after all.

Would You Like A Double-Decker Seat?

Regardless, Núñez Vicente is determined. He plans on scoring partners so he can turn this version of the Chaise Longue design into a pre-production prototype that will be made out of materials that can fly. His hope is to display the prototype version at next year’s Aircraft Interiors Expo. As far as the seat itself, I’m not going to be convinced until it’s certified for flight and some airlines start caring about it. Even then, I still don’t like the thought of passengers climbing up and down their seats. That seems to expose too much risk for falling injuries and crowding during emergencies. That assumes it ever goes into production, and at this stage, I doubt it will.

Credit where credit is due, I’m impressed that Núñez Vicente continues to develop the Chaise Longue. This is now the fourth iteration that has been shown to the public, and no matter how much the Internet mocks the thing, he isn’t giving up on it. Honestly, it’s almost inspirational, in a way. This is a man who isn’t letting the haters get him down. So, bravo to that.

Top graphic image: Chaise Longue