Image this: You are ready on the departure gate at New York’s JFK airport to board your flight to New Zealand. You can be flying economic system, so no non-public house or lie-flat mattress for you. Oh, and the flight is 17 hours. How do you’re feeling? Now not jazzed, I am guessing.

However would you’re feeling another way about your drawing close adventure for those who knew that halfway via your flight you have to take a four-hour smash out of your center seat and restricted legroom in a personal bunk (leaving sufficient time for 2 90-minute sleep cycles)? I do know I might.

The concept that is greater than only a pipe dream because of Air New Zealand, which on Tuesday unveiled new cabin designs to be fitted first in its 2024 batch of Dreamliners, together with six “Skynest” pods. Stacked 3 top like a triple bunk, each and every pod might be bookable for four-hour stints all through the flight by way of passengers touring in economic system, economic system stretch (additional legroom seats) and top class economic system.

The pods might be tucked away within the center phase of the airplane between the economic system and economic system stretch cabins. The bedding might be refreshed for each and every passenger by way of the workforce throughout a 30-minute changeover duration. You are able to upload a Skynest sleep consultation in your reserving simply as you possibly can additional luggage. How a lot it is going to value has but to be decided, however it is going to most probably be a lot more inexpensive than a seat in Air New Zealand’s Trade Premier and Trade Premier Luxe cabins.

Air New Zealand’s Dreamliners are set to provider its ultra-long haul routes, together with New York, Chicago and Houston. It is on the ones super-lengthy trips that a possibility for a correctly restful snooze might be maximum welcome.

The airline first unveiled the theory of the Skynest again in 2020, however thought designs for revolutionizing plane seating are steadily little greater than a tease that involves not anything. Now not so in this instance — the Skynest is extra than simply blue-sky pondering and is ready to turn out to be a fact. 

From its viral inflight protection movies to distinctive seating designs, Air New Zealand has a historical past of experimentation and no longer merely following aviation business tendencies. A few of its experiments do not remaining (RIP top class economic system Spaceseat, I am sorry to by no means have flown in you). Others are nonetheless round lately, such because the Skycouch — a row of 3 economic system seats that may be reserved and became a mattress — which the airline introduced in 2011 and which may even make it onto the brand new Dreamliners.

However so far as getting 40 winks in economic system is going, the Skynest may well be without equal game-changer, providing a degree of privateness that the Skycouch lacks. Let’s hope it sticks round — and preferably that different airways catch on.