AutoFly-X Chair: more autonomy for flight experience through an innovative aisle chair

Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (Poli-USP)

Pedro Orii Antonacio, Pedro Orii Antonacio, Yuri Spuras Tajima, Denilton Donizetti Silva, Lucas Aparecido Bernardes Cruz

Traveling with reduced mobility or physical disability can be a very difficult task, especially if it involves being within the restricted space of the airplane. Aircrafts have physical constraints that create difficulties for accessibility. For this reason, those passengers with reduced mobility or physical disability often have a challenging journey throughout the entire flight experience. Aiming to provide more autonomy for people with reduced mobility or physical disability and to make their flight experience more comfortable and safe, our research team developed the AutoFly-X Chair to substitute current aircraft aisle chairs, that are small, narrow and don’t provide the user with enough stability and sense of safety. AutoFly-X Chair is an innovative motorized aisle chair that allows the user to board, to disembark and to move within the aircraft independently. The AutoFly-X Chair becomes the seat of the aircraft when anchored on a docking platform attached to the aircraft fuselage via a seat track. To enable the AutoFly-X Chair to maneuver within such a tight space as the aircraft aisle, we developed an innovative seat turning mechanism that allows the seat to rotate in relation to the bottom part of the chair. The main benefits of this solution are to reduce seat transfers during the flight experience and to provide more autonomy for passengers during flights. The AutoFly-X Chair was evaluated in a focus group. The results show that the proposed solution is considered superior to current solutions in nine of twenty requirements and neutral in one of them.

RESNA Design Brief

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