Sci-Tech

How airline seats became key tech products

Published

1 week ago

September 5, 2024

Chris Baraniuk

It’s estimated that one third of the world’s airline seats are made in Northern Ireland

Chris Baraniuk Eoin Murray, operations manager at Thompson Aero Seating, stands next to a jig holding a partly assembled airline seat — It’s estimated that one third of the world’s airline seats are made in Northern Ireland

In a warehouse building in a quiet town in Northern Ireland, a robot arm is opening and closing an airplane meal table over and over again.

It has been programmed to carry out this mundane task no fewer than 28,000 times, day and night, for more than a week. And it won’t even get a bag of peanuts.

“We can measure the force that the robot’s having to apply to that,” says Gerald King, head of engineering at Thompson Aero Seating in Banbridge. “Is it increasing? Which means more friction.”

Thompson makes first class and business class seats – the expensive kind usually at the front of passenger aircraft, with their own privacy-simulating enclosures, built-in entertainment systems, and heaps of leg room.

The company has various machines for testing the longevity and safety of such seats. Including a new £7.5m facility, opened last autumn, where crash test dummies are strapped to a seat and shot down a short track at incredible speeds.

The idea is to ensure that the seat – and passenger – would survive a brief exposure to 16 g’s. It is the only facility of its kind on the island of Ireland.

Perhaps surprisingly, just under one third of the world’s aircraft seats are manufactured in Northern Ireland, according to Invest NI, an economic development agency. Thompson, which was bought by a Chinese company in 2016, is one of a few businesses in the region that specialise in this trade. The firm currently churns out roughly 1,500 seats per year.

Another major Northern Ireland-based supplier of seats is Collins Aerospace, in Kilkeel. There is also Alice Blue Aero, in Craigavon.

One of the largest seat manufacturing companies worldwide is Safran. It has facilities on six continents.

But, thanks to the pandemic, demand for aircraft seats has flip-flopped dramatically of late. When Covid-19 emerged, the aerospace manufacturing industry slowed to a crawl. Globally, companies laid off thousands of workers. Thompson, for one, cut its own workforce in half, and has faced financial losses running to many millions.

The world has at last opened up again, but seat manufacturers have not been able to find all the skilled workers they need, meaning that demand, globally speaking, is outstripping supply. It is a “very difficult situation”, Airbus’ chief executive said in June, referring to the slow supply of seats and other cabin parts.

“The industry lost that expertise, both in terms of direct, hands-on manufacturing, but also in terms of teaching younger people how to do the job,” explains Nick Cunningham, an analyst at Agency Partners who tracks the fortunes of another seat maker, Safran.

One of the problems, he adds, is that seat makers are finding it hard to get their seats tested and certified quickly by third-parties, since they are also facing labour shortages.

Testing and certifying airlines seats has held up production

Chris Baraniuk Crash test dummies sit on trolleys wearing orange jerseys. — Testing and certifying airlines seats has held up production

Thompson, however, can sidestep this problem with its in-house testing facilities, explains Colm McEvoy, vice president of corporate accounts. He says that the firm is able to meet its customers’ needs at present, though he adds, “We’re having to be very strategic with regards to the new customers.”

There are more than 650 people working at Thompson’s sites in Northern Ireland, but, at the time of writing, the company had more than a dozen job vacancies listed on its website. “We’re in competition with other manufacturing companies to try and secure the best talent,” says Mr McEvoy.

Despite this challenge, Thompson has a five-year plan to multiply its annual output of seats. Mr McEvoy shows me around the factory floor at the firm’s Portadown site, where workers are busy riveting aluminium seat parts together, and checking the complex wiring for the entertainment systems in these expensive structures – each seat costs “tens of thousands” to make, says Mr McEvoy.

“This seat in front of you is the most complex seat we make,” adds Eoin Murray, operations manager. It takes around 100 hours for the highly skilled workers here to assemble in full.

More Technology of Business

Mr Murray is determined to boost the rate of production on this factory floor. He shows off a jig, developed in-house, upon which a seat can be mounted and angled so that workers can easily access the sides or underside. “This allows us to hit like a rate 14,” says Mr Murray – 14 seats produced in one shift. “I need to get to 18. To 20,” he adds.

To that end, there’s another even more capable version of the jig in the room next door, a prototype that staff here hope will be even better. Mr Murray and his colleagues are also developing new working practices – such as utility belts with tools arranged in the sequence they are required.

If the worker is left-handed, that sequence can be reversed so that the process of picking a tool and carrying out a task with it is as rapid as possible.

Workers here rehearse and hone key stages of seat assembly, which helps them go faster. A bit like learning how to build the same piece of Ikea furniture over and over again until it becomes like muscle memory, I suggest – just a lot more complicated.

“We can seamlessly slot people in, and they can now work through these different stages with no computers,” says Mr Murray. “When I started working here, if you told me I would be working without a computer I’d have told you [that] you were crazy.”

More and more technology is going into airline seats

Chris Baraniuk A man holds a media controller, which looks a bit like a handheld games console. — More and more technology is going into airline seats

Besides volume, there is constant pressure to come up with new and better seat designs, says Mr McEvoy. Airlines want the latest and best entertainment technology, for example – 32 inch screens are now included in Thompson’s top seats.

“They’re striving for something different, something that makes them unique,” Mr McEvoy adds. Thompson uses leather and soft fabrics on selected parts of the seat and enclosure to provide a luxury feel, which is increasingly popular with airlines. The seats themselves can recline into two-metre long, fully flat beds.

One I try for myself is certainly comfortable – though I would probably have to lie in it for seven hours or so to test it properly, I think to myself.

“They’re good firms, very, very good firms – they know what they’re doing,” says Marisa Garcia, an aviation industry analyst who used to work in seat manufacturing herself, referring to the Northern Ireland-based companies who make aircraft seats. She has no commercial relationship with any of them, she adds.

Despite supply chain headaches, seat manufacturers are in a good position to clean up, if they prove themselves able to keep pace with industry requirements, says Ms Garcia: “The demand is there from passengers – and the demand is there from airlines.”

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Sci-Tech

Cristiano Ronaldo first to hit 1bn social media followers

Published

3 days ago

September 13, 2024

Tom Gerken

Cristiano Ronaldo has hit 1bn total followers across his various social media accounts – making him the first person to reach that mind-boggling figure.

The number is calculated by combining his total number of followers across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Chinese social media sites Weibo and Kuaishou.

It does not equate to one billion individual followers, as many people will follow him across multiple platforms, and some will be fake accounts, known as bots.

Nonetheless social media expert Paolo Pescatore, from PP Foresight, described it as a “staggering number” that media and brands would pay close attention to.

“What an achievement, and it further underlines the fundamental shift taking place in media.”

It showed “the power to reach new, younger audiences thanks to technology”, he told the BBC.

On the pitch, Ronaldo was famed for his rivalry with Argentinian star Lionel Messi.

But off it, there is no competition for who is winning the social media contest – Messi has a mere 623 million followers.

Some of the other celebrities with the biggest presence on social media are:

690m: Selena Gomez, actor/singer
607m: Justin Bieber, singer
574m: Taylor Swift, singer

Other notable names the BBC looked into include The Rock (557m), Kylie Jenner (551m ) and Ariana Grande (508m).

MrBeast, the top YouTuber in the world, has 543m total followers, while WWE, often considered to have an enormous social media presence, can only point to reaching a quarter of the audience of Cristiano Ronaldo with 268m combined followers.

The footballer will have reached this milestone thanks to his decision to join YouTube last month, where his channel rocketed to 50 million subscribers within a single week.

So far, the channel consists mainly of conversations between Ronaldo and his wife Georgina Rodríguez, as well as his former Manchester United colleague Rio Ferdinand.

He announced the news in a post shared across his various social media platforms.

Cristiano Ronaldo has made a career out of breaking records.

His successes include being top scorer in Uefa Champions League history, having the most goals in the European Championship, and making more international appearances than anyone else.

Last week he became the first footballer to score 900 top-level career goals.

As with his playing career, he still has scope to improve his numbers on social media too, as unlike some of his rivals, he is not on TikTok or Threads.

All of which is likely to add to another figure he dominates: earnings.

According to Forbes, his total earnings now stand at $260 million – the highest of any athlete.

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Sci-Tech

Musk and Zuckerberg have ‘polluted culture’

Published

3 days ago

September 13, 2024

Zoe Kleinman

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human history”, Stephen Fry has said.

The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London.

“You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world,” he said of the pair.

The BBC has approached the two men’s companies for comment.

Mr Fry has a track record of being an early adopter of technology – and was once a regular poster on X, when it was known as Twitter.

He stopped posting in 2022, a few months after the platform was purchased by Mr Musk, but has retained his account. He is no longer active on any social networks.

“I’m the chump who thought social media could change the world,” he told his audience at the Digital Futures Institute.

He said he was at first enthusiastic about the potential of social media to unite people around the world and bring about positive change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which were coordinated online as an example – but added that he had been proved wrong.

He described what he considered to be a fatal flaw in attempts by early Facebook algorithms to “maximise engagement”, saying nobody had predicted that engagement would be “most maximised by… the worst passions” such as anger, shock and horror.

“We are decidedly hopeless at knowing where technology will take us or what it will do to us,” he said.

He returned to the theme several times throughout his one hour speech, in which he also considered the future of artificial intelligence.

Mr Fry argued that AI was “poised to disrupt every space we have”.

He said he hoped corporate greed would not corrupt the development of AI tech at the expense of safety.

“The best I can do is this – Einstein and Russell said in their manifesto on nuclear weapons – we appeal as human beings to human beings, remember your humanity and forget the rest,” he said.

Mr Fry’s broadside was not the only attack on Mr Musk.

Earlier on Thursday, senior Meta executive Sir Nick Clegg, talking at Chatham House, in London, had been similarly scathing of Mr Musk’s platform X.

The former deputy prime minister called it “a tiny, elite, news-obsessed, politics-obsessed app” and added that in his view the social network had become “a one-man hyper-partisan hobby horse.”

In March 2024 X claimed to have 550 million monthly visitors. Facebook has just over 3bn.

Additional reporting by Liv McMahon

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Sci-Tech

Vodafone clashes with UK’s competition watchdog over Three merger

Published

3 days ago

September 13, 2024

Tom Gerken and Nick Edser

Vodafone and Three have rejected claims by the UK’s competition watchdog that their proposed merger would lead to higher prices for millions of mobile users.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has “provisionally concluded” the deal would weaken competition between mobile networks.

It has particular concerns that customers who are least able to afford mobile services would be most affected.

The findings are the latest from the CMA’s ongoing probe into the merger, which it launched in January.

The regulator will now consult on its findings and potential solutions to its worries over competition.

These solutions could include legally binding investment commitments, and measures to protect both retail and wholesale customers.

Vodafone’s CEO for European Markets, Ahmed Essam, told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that he still believed the merger would make a better network for customers, and add to the competition in the market.

“We’ve made a significant commitment to an £11bn investment,” he said.

“We’re willing to make sure that this is legally binding, and we undertake a commitment to deploy this.”

He also said the firm had already traded part of its radio spectrum with a competitor.

But the CMA said it is “not convinced” that it would be good for consumers.

“The main knockback to the merging parties is that the CMA considers claims of superior network quality post integration to be “overstated”,” said Kester Mann from analysis firm CCS Insight.

But he said the regulator was not shutting the door on the deal.

“Vodafone and Three should be encouraged by the tone of the CMA’s report, which appears more open to the merger than I was expecting.”

But Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at consumer group Which?, took a different view.

“The regulator’s finding has set a high bar for the merger to proceed,” she said.

“It is clear from those findings that the planned merger between Vodafone and Three could have a negative impact on millions of consumers.”

But she warned it would be “challenging” for the regulator to find remedies for its concerns.

Vodafone and Three revealed plans to merge their UK-based operations in June last year, creating the biggest mobile network in the UK with around 27 million customers.

But the CMA provisionally concluded on Wednesday that such a deal would lead to a “substantial lessening in competition”.

In addition to worries over price and service levels, the regulator is also concerned that the deal may make it more difficult for smaller players such as Lyca Mobile, Sky Mobile and Lebara – who rent space from the bigger operators – to get a good deal.

Vodafone and Three have said the tie-up would lead to an additional investment of £11bn in the UK.

The CMA found that a merger of the two could improve the quality of mobile networks and accelerate next generation 5G networks and services, as claimed by the companies.

But it considered these claims were “overstated”, and that the merged firm would not necessarily have the incentive to carry out planned investment after the merger.

In a statement, Vodafone and Three said they disagreed with the CMA’s findings.

“By all measures, the merger is pro-growth, pro-customer and pro-competition. It can, and should, be approved by the CMA,” they said.

The CMA will issue a final report into the deal in December.

The firms added they would be working with the regulator to secure approval for the tie-up.

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