US/Northern Ireland Investment Conference:The Northern economy is dotted with hotspots of innovation. Dan Keenantalks to two entrepreneurs planning to revolutionise flying

A SMALL COMPANY working in a small business park beside the south Down fishing port of Kilkeel believes it is on to a good thing.

Thompson Solutions' design for aircraft furnishing means that airlines can give passengers more room while squeezing more of them into a cabin. The only modification needed, they say, is for additional drop-down emergency oxygen masks to be fitted.

In a sense, designer James Thompson has squared a circle and found a seating design and configuration which provide both more individual space and more seats at the same time.

Delta Airlines, now the biggest carrier in the world following its acquisition of Northwest, agrees with him and his marketing man, Brian Rogers. They are now looking to research, development and some manufacturing, all based in Kilkeel.

Thompson commuted by air to England every week for nearly a decade while working for Raynard, Virgin's in-house seating company. While doing so he realised how to provide two inches of extra space for each seat. By staggering the seat alignment, breaking up the standard in-line arrangement, he could deliver both more comfort and more room.

"On traditional seats if you put in two inches of extra room, it means they lose seats. But with this design, if you overlap in the right way, you can get an extra column of seats the full length of the aircraft."

Thompson knows airlines will not increase passenger space "just because it's more comfortable".

"They want to see revenue and return. With this idea we proved the revenue and return, but it's taken us five years to bring it to market here." The revenue implications are striking, he says. "On a Boeing 767 there's a two-three-two seating configuration. It can now go to two-four-two."

"An Airbus A340 is a two-four-two configuration, it can now go to a three-three-three. And so you move on up. A Boeing 777 aircraft that was nine abreast is now 10 abreast. A Boeing 747 is 10 abreast, it becomes 11 abreast."

The extra seats and the revenue they generate mean pure profit over existing costs. Take a plane with 100 seats, argues Thompson: a typical break-even point is 75 fare-paying passengers, everything above that figure is profit.

"This means that if you have 77 passengers, you have your two-seat profit. But if you've 10 per cent more seats on board your operating load factor doesn't change, it still runs at 77 per cent. But now there's 77 per cent of 110 seats - that's 77 seats plus another 7.7 seats making 9.7 seats. That's nearly a five-fold profit rise.

"Where you have two [profitable] seats before, now you've got 9.7, so that is worth a tremendous amount of money for an airline."

The logic also applies in the business cabins where the Thompson design allows greater space between passengers and a horizontal sleeping position.

His "more room and more seats" formula can multiply into tens of millions in extra revenue across an airline's fleet of 100 aircraft. "These are all installed in the existing aircraft frame. Nothing changes."

Thompson and Rogers are confident that five years down the line, their seats will be in the air and they will manage a manufacturing plant with up to 300 staff. Hopefully this will be in Kilkeel, alongside the pier where the trawlers tie up. But they face problems of official red tape, corporation tax issues and infrastructural issues.

Local expertise, however, is not a problem. Like Thompson, many skilled workers worked at the nearby aircraft furnishings plant run by B/E Aerospace. Others, says Rogers, had to be head-hunted. "We had to go further afield to get some of them, but those people were originally from here. We only brought them back, they were all over the world and we had to offer them the money to come back here."

He is emphatic there is no shortage of innovation in the North. Thompson agrees.

"If you take the airline industry, the number of senior people from all of Ireland - it's probably the second biggest nationality in the industry. I don't see how people can say Ireland as a whole is not innovative when these key people from big organisations the world over are leading the way.

"If these people were to come back here and be offered the right money, Ireland would be on top of the world."