Posted on September 13, 2010 by Fiona Hilliard

Just when you thought budget airlines couldn’t get any worse, welcome to SUB-ECONOMY class.

Yes, indeedy.

If aircraft interior designers have their way, skint passengers may soon be taking their seats on the SkyRider, a new type of passenger seat that is closer to a horse saddle than an armchair.

The new seating design is set to go public next week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas in Long Beach.

Essentially, the design makes leg-room a thing of the past.

As illustrated in the image, the passenger’s weight is distributed to the legs and then the legs are tucked under the seat in front.

So how close are the seats?

Aviointeriors, the masterminds behind the design say the seat-pitch is 23-inches.  For those of you not familiar with flight interior design lingo, ‘seat pitch’ is the distance between the same point on two seats. At the moment, the shortest seat-pitch on economy-class flights is around 31-inches.

At least that rules out reclining…more importantly the selfish so-and-sos who insist on tilting their seats back on economy flights. 

No airlines have yet signed up to the SkyRider, but it’s only a matter of time…isn’t that right Michael? I don’t know if you can make out from the blurry blueprints, but isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that the designers have chosen a rather fetching combination of blue and yellow…who could they have possibly had in mind?