Correlation Analysis Between Passengers' Anthropometry and Seat Tray Table Height for In-Flight Activity Comfort

Abstract

During flight, passengers’ comfort can be linked to their self-state, cabin design environment and also their in-flight activities. It is noted that the common passengers’ in-flight activities while seated such as eating, writing and using a laptop greatly involve the use of seat tray table. Consequently, from design ergonomics point of view, it is crucial for the seat tray table to be of appropriate height to enable the passengers to use it with comfortable sitting posture. However, due to the different anthropometry measurements, different passengers may require different tray table height to comfortably conduct their in-flight activities. In line with this notion, an experiment is conducted using an aircraft cabin mock-up that is located at Aerospace Design Simulation Laboratory, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia. For this experiment, 38 participants were asked to sit inside the cabin mock-up and conduct two common in-flight seated activities: eating and using a laptop, which involves the use of the seat tray table. The height of seat tray table is adjusted until the participants felt adequately comfortable to perform each activity. The collected data is later analyzed using statistical software package, MINITAB. On the whole, based on the findings from statistical correlation analysis, it can be concluded that the comfortable seat tray table height for both in-flight activities is correlated with the passengers’ anthropometric measurements. The top associated sitting anthropometric measurements for the eating activity are found to be crown buttock height, buttock knee length, eye height, elbow height and shoulder height. On the other hand, for using a laptop, the top parameters are forward grip reach, abdominal depth, crown buttock height, buttock heel length and popliteal height. Based on this finding, these anthropometry parameters should be taken into consideration while designing the seat tray table, especially in deciding its proper height.