Airplane seats: Move over, darling

Singapore Airlines is introducing an innovation: plane seats that can be turned into a bed for two. How cosy can you get, asks Simon Calder

"Blimey! Bonking beds in business." The person responsible for this exclamation is a senior figure in the travel industry, who has sworn me to secrecy. But his (or her) reaction to the latest business-class enhancement is echoed by other travel notables. The location is the Banqueting Hall in London, the historic location chosen by Singapore Airlines to unveil its new "Raffles Class" product.

The carrier, which this week was named Airline of the Year, is spending £70m to refurbish the business-class cabins of its 45 long-range jets, a mix of Boeing 747s and 777s. The first of these will take off tomorrow from Heathrow, destination Singapore.

The frills range from inflight mains electricity for laptops to a week's free mobile-phone rental upon arrival in the city state. But travellers – and rivals – will be focussing on the "SpaceBed" that is trumpeted as the biggest business-class bed in the world. Not only does it extend to 6ft 6in, accommodating all but the tallest flyer, it also offers the closest approximation yet to a double bed in a modern airliner. An arm rest and divider separate each pair of seats, but these can be folded down to allow close proximity.

"You can bump elbows with your neighbour," says Tom Boozer, the airline's vice-president for innovation. "If they're someone you know, so much the better." He and I lie back in unusually close proximity and stare up at the breathtaking Rubens on the ceiling of the Banqueting House, perhaps thinking of England.

Mr Boozer denies that the airline is expecting an increase in inflight intimacy. "People can sleep and wake up the next day when they get to where they're going, and they can function. At some point the twig breaks when you keep bending it, and the idea here is to keep the twig from bending too much."

Luxury does not come cheap. Yesterday I checked prices for a London-Singapore return flight for travel out next Saturday through the discount agency Quest Travel. The economy fare, with four nights' accommodation thrown in, works out at around £560. The same deal, same hotel, with travel in business class, comes in at about £2,100. But the next man I found myself reclining with, the aviation expert John Bell, says price isn't everything.

"Where the fare doesn't matter then seats come into play in a major, major way." He foresees intense competition between designers offering increasingly elaborate flat-folding beds, with the traveller's concerns being "whether you can go to sleep or not, and how flat you can go to sleep, and how comfortable you are and how healthy you are".

Is there any hope for people who are not inclined to pay four times the fare for extra comfort? "Comfort is not a class privilege," says Franco Mancassola, whose company, Avio Interiors, helped design and build the new seat. "As a former airline chief executive I know that airline profit is measured in inches and seconds.

"It's up to us now, the manufacturers, to find a way that the airlines can maintain their pitch, but we can provide them with a solution to provide comfort. We are working very hard to unveil an economy-class seat that is comfortable and that is pleasurable to sit in and that addresses the concern about deep-vein thrombosis," Mr Mancassola says.

Even though the new Singapore Airlines cabin does not take to the air until tomorrow, every member of the design team has already spent at least one night snuggling up in the new seat. "I slept like a baby," says Mr Boozer.