As part of its excellent refinement of the outward-facing herringbone in its Aria seat, Cathay Pacific has made a step-change in technology and user interface, changing the way that passengers interact with their seat. Its enormous main IFE touchscreen — one of four separate touch controls in the seat — is the heart of the Aria experience, pointing the way to one possible future for inflight entertainment.
As you spend time in the Aria seat (which I did, full disclosure, as a guest of the airline from London to Hong Kong), it is clear that it is exceedingly high-tech, and Cathay is very much to be praised for being an early adopter for much of it. This is both a strength and a weakness for the product, because while much of the conceptualisation is avant-garde, some of the underpinning technological elements on which this advanced gestalt relies are not yet fully formed.
In terms of strengths, the user interface that wraps the Panasonic Avionics-manufactured IFE is beautiful and intuitive, and the highlighting of much-loved elements like the forward-facing camera and map are strong.
I loved watching the takeoff camera, especially seated in a middle seat. Image: John Walton
Unfortunately for Cathay, this means that the very low-definition content throughout its movie and TV library is visible. Surprisingly, given industry’s upscaling work, even the newest blockbusters were visibly grainy, and subtitles seemed incorrectly encoded. It rather felt like buying a new 4K widescreen and then playing 480p YouTube videos on it.
Cathay’s selection is broad, but without exception it was all low-res. Image: John Walton
This was the case both on my screen and other screens that I observed around the cabin while stretching my legs.
The content resolution was, simply unacceptable. Image: John Walton
Another tradeoff: the screen is enormous, but it shines a lot (and I mean a lot) of light up on the ceiling and into rows behind. With a full cabin, a couple of times I was distracted by the amount of flickering and flashing from others’ movies. Consideration might be given to greater directionality of the light emission from this screen, as well as potentially some slow cabin-wide screen brightness reduction protocols during overnight periods.
The seat and IFE can be controlled almost infinitely from the four separate controls: the main screen, the remote, the thigh-side seat adjustment touchscreen, and the smaller flat/relax/upright buttons by one’s head.
The four touch controls are the main screen at the right, the remote at the top , the black rectangular touchscreen at the armrest below the sliding table, and the small control panel at the very left of the armrest. Image: John Walton
This is very useful if you want to return to a particular position, but overall I found that the only positions I wanted to return to were flat, upright or relax — for everything else I wanted to adjust my legrest or backrest a bit.
One mode of controlling the seat is via the touchscreen. Image: John Walton
And here’s the rub: these controls sound like a great thing, until you realise that to adjust your legrest you have to press a button at least four times, with the easiest being via the seat adjustment touchscreen: one to wake it up, one to tap past the hours-remaining indicator (an otherwise useful addition), one to go deeper into the adjustments for granular footrest raise/lower, and one to actually make the adjustments you want.
This haptic control panel is the easiest way to adjust your legrest, but I wouldn’t call it “easy”. Image: John Walton
I like to shift seated position every so often on a flight of more than twelve hours, and I have to say that by the end of it I was pining for the 2010 Cirrus seat’s simple manual adjustment clickers, imagining some sort of updated bronze-effect brushwing-style representation rather than jabbing at the tiny thigh-side touchscreen.
I genuinely pined for this excellent, simple and functional physical seat control. Image: John Walton
Aria’s lighting is subdued throughout, and there are preset options (that you can customise) for various activities like dining, relaxing, and so on. Almost all the lighting comes from various lights hidden within the sidelight next to your shoulder — Cathay has removed the overhead lighting options dating back many a decade.
Cathay removed the overhead lighting without replacing the task lighting element in the seat. I genuinely think this was a mistake. Image: John Walton
I had very mixed reactions to this, because the table-focussed task lighting was insufficiently bright to eat dinner or, indeed, to read a book. Changing the lighting paradigm is praiseworthy, but this felt rather like one of those luxury hotel rooms where it takes you too long to figure out how to turn off and on that one light, and where you can’t ever find the right amount of lighting for a task. Both those complaints are very valid within Aria.
The ambient lighting comes from this light (this shot is looking upwards) and the task lighting comes from mini-spots within the black section inside it. Image: John Walton
More widely, my seat seemed slightly cursed in the electronics department, so with a pinch of early-delivery gremlin-flavoured salt I report that neither the USB-C, USB-A or AC socket would reliably charge my late-model iPhone, either with my pocket 18W AC charger, the larger 65W AC multi-charger I usually only unpack in the hotel room, or via direct connection to the USB-C outlet.
Was my seat electrically cursed? was it gremlins? In any case, charging my phone was an issue. Image: John Walton
I have two theories here. One is that it’s just early-delivery gremlins: I was on the first airframe with Aria seats. The other theory has more implications for the industry, because I can’t help but suspect balancing issues in the power distribution between rows on older aircraft like the 777-300ER, because the passenger in front of me had a very large pro-level laptop out and charging while editing some videos. Something for the industry to keep an eye on, for sure, because this is not a new problem.
The seat also got stuck in the flat position, requiring a crewmember to reach into it and fiddle with something to make it start moving again. Again, possibly cursed and/or gremlins, but it was a relatively easy fix that didn’t require a full seat reset.
None of these issues, with perhaps the exception of the task lighting and the power distribution, is insurmountable, and apart from the content resolution and subtitles issue none of these is a major ding to the experience.
Aria is, still, a superlative product in the category, and fixes to these issues should be relatively simple. For seat adjustment, Cathay could add a small seat control overlay to the pause screen on its movies, say, or reprogram the remote to always show these. As I conclude this piece, I’m struck by the impetus away from massive touchscreens back to specific buttons for specific tasks in automobiles. Can aviation learn this lesson more swiftly?
The side remote just shows volume and brightness unless you wake it up. Could it show seat adjustments as well or instead? Image: John Walton
Cathay Pacific provided roundtrip tickets to enable the review from which this article stemmed, but all opinions are unfettered and the author’s own.
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Featured image credited to John Walton
