Is the weight of flying first class worth it?
Swiss International Air Lines is being forced to rebalance their planes because their new first-class seats are too heavy, CNN reported.
Swiss — the flag carrier of Switzerland — was set to install the new seats, known as Swiss Senses, as part of a revamp to enhance the passenger experience, which was supposed to debut in winter 2025-2026.
The jumbo seats include six-foot walls and sliding locking doors for each 37-square-foot suite, giving passengers a complete made-in-Switzerland experience.
With these seats being in the front of the Airbus A330s, they ultimately made the aircraft nose-heavy. The airline is going to have to fit a massive “balancing plate” at the back of the plane to balance it out.
Once the new interior upgrades are installed and weighed, the balancing plates will be installed and “remain aboard these aircraft until other options can be developed” as the airline searches for potential replacement technology.
The plate will not be visible to economy passengers.
The current first-class seats on the airline weigh 452 pounds, and the final weight of the new seats “will not be known until [they are] installed,” a spokesperson told CNN.
Industry trends show that first and business class seats are getting heavier to provide more privacy to passengers as economy seats are getting lighter, Swiss said in a statement, per CNN, and “these two contrasting trends are changing the center of gravity of the aircraft in which such seats are installed.”
Though the first-class renovations are coming to the airlines Airbus A330s and Boeing 777s, only the Airbus A330s are facing this issue due to it already being a nose-heavy aircraft to begin with.
The spokesperson noted that the renovations came in response to customers telling the airline “in no uncertain terms that it is time we modernized the cabin interiors of our longhaul aircraft, and especially our Airbus A330-300s.”
Swiss has tested removing weight from other aspects of the plane by potentially not adding sliding doors and trimming the first-class cabin from eight seats to four. They’ve also considered adding more seats to economy to even it out, but the airline rejected the idea to preserve passenger comfort.
The airline denied that this was a “planning error,” saying that they used “rough estimates” of weight, which won’t be confirmed until the aircrafts are completely done being worked on.