On the plane, however, everything seems to be going well. We are witnessing the installation of the first business seat.
Installing a seat like this in a 777 means fixing it to the floor, wiring it and also installing the sliding partitions.
A work of great precision that will take regarding an hour. Three people will intervene, the one who will mount the seat on the rail, the one who will check it and the controller who validates the correct value of the torquing, an operation to check the conformity of the tightening and the fixing to the floor of all the elements.
A rigor which makes these technicians very often get down on all fours on the floor, plans and assembly instructions in hand to check to the millimeter that the work has been carried out correctly.
Same meticulousness for all of the 369 seats in this new cabin, but also for the luggage racks, the furniture, the partitions, the offices, the 350 square m² of carpeting and the 5 kilometers of cables.
Another mission of the technical teams: to limit the weight of the aircraft. Even if in its final version the number of seats decreases on board (369 places once morest 381 previously), the densification of the Business and Premium Economy classes with larger seats tends to weigh down the aircraft.
There too, thanks to meticulous work to remove everything that can be removed and also ever lighter materials with equal robustness, weight gain will be limited to 500 kilos for this aircraft which weighs around 300 tonnes.