Newton Abbot-based Rockwood Composites (Rockwood) and HAECO Cockpit Solutions announced that they will jointly develop a new commercial aircraft seat called Eclipse. This customizable seat will be made of composite materials, molded surfaces and corresponding mold designs. Eclipse is a new high-end series of products. With the company's patented staggered seat layout, redefining short-haul business class and long-haul high-end economy class, providing a luxury experience similar to long-haul business class, while also improving the economy of airlines .
Eclipse has many technical and composite engineering challenges, including the need to design a modular, lightweight structure to enable HAECO to plan the future alignment of the product. In addition, the shape used is not new, but the scale and industrial design are the "first" of the seat, and the composite surface has never been used in this type of product before. Through the cooperation between the two companies, Lockwood offers a lightweight product through an innovative combination of materials and tools with a certain degree of flexibility. In the development of Eclipse, Lockwood is mainly responsible for the design and manufacture of seat surround systems, and tool design and manufacturing. The UK-based composites company is currently producing the seat surround system. The surround system is connected to the back of the seat, not the floor base. This new arrangement has many economic advantages, takes up less space, reduces qualification costs, and provides first-class experience, but at a much lower cost.
HAECO has designed a seat surround system that can be used in some markets. The component is designed with a perfectly matched metal compression mold, bonded together through a modular design, and then finished and coated. The engineering challenge is to achieve a structure with appropriate stiffness and be able to withstand 16G strength in a crash test environment, while reflecting some flexibility. This design is very suitable for Lockwood's compression molding design manufacturing process.