The Future of Airline Seating

You never know where inspiration is going to strike. For designer Emil Jacob, it was on a 2004 flight to Paris from his homeland of Romania when he gave up trying to get comfortable in his seat and decided to simply lie on the floor. "I tried to sleep on three empty seats, but the armrests wouldn't go up since they were fixed," he says. And that is when the light bulb went off. "When you lie on the floor of an aircraft, you notice a lot of unused space above you," he says. "Even when you're sitting in a plane, there's all this unused empty space above you."