A3, Airbus’ Silicon Valley-based innovation subsidiary, has come up with a unique passenger aircraft plan, which will have interchangeable modular interiors. They will have the demonstration ready within “a few years.”
The announcement was a part of the event when A3’s unveiled its Transpose project who will be designing the modular plane. Transpose project executive Jason Chua was asked if the project is ambitious to which he positively replied that by keeping up the current pace, the concept is perfectly achievable.
The Transpose project isn’t the first venture that has sought to build a modular aircraft, in which a plane’s interior configuration could be quickly and dramatically transformed. What makes the Transpose approach different is that it won’t require the production of a whole new aircraft which otherwise costs billions of dollars and take decades more to achieve it. A3 will be using the existing Airbus cargo planes where the pallets, containers and other components are already loaded and offloaded in less than an hour. Chua said that A3 is currently working with a cargo variant of the Airbus A330-200 wide body jet. Airlines that would operate the Transpose project’s modular planes after it reaches the market can exchange seating aisles for a dining cabin or turn first-class seats into coach seats. An airline could even fill a module, or a portion of a module, with exercise bicycles during a day flight and then reconfigure that space for sleeping on a redeye as Chua said.
Compared to this proposed model, an interior reconfiguration in today’s passenger aircraft can take weeks or longer to complete and can cost millions. The Transpose concept would work by dividing a plane into various module spaces. Modules themselves would be designed by airlines and to their imagination.
It’s now approximately a year that the project has been underway and A3 has begun building sample modules.
