Recently, Air China Limited maintenance staff are redoubling their efforts on a Boeing 777 aircraft cabin upgrade program in Ameco Beijing's 4-bay hangar. The retrofit program focuses on improving passenger comfort by adding a premium economy class and updating business class seats as well as in-flight entertainment equipment. Air China plans to upgrade the entire fleet of 10 Boeing 777-200s to enhance the overall service quality and to improve its maintenance strength.

Air China attached great importance to the cabin upgrade and set up a special working group to operate the redesigning work. It is the first time for the Air China maintenance staff to upgrade Boeing 777-200 aircraft cabin. However, its successful experience of upgrading the A340 first class and business class seats makes them confident to take the challenge.

According to a staff in charge of the program, the upgrade mainly concerns the aircraft cabin and entertainment system, requiring cooperations from all the engineering, technical and construction staff of electronics, electrical engineering, mechanics, cabin and structure. The task is difficult and heavy and will take a long time. To this end, the company carefully made preparations and arrangements.

The redesign was carried out along with routine maintenance in order to cut the stopping time of maintenance and to reduce the impact on Air China's flight capacity, so they updated the cabin LCD monitors during routine maintenance. Since they replaced the first LCD monitors in December last year, the working group has completed the replacement of 92 monitors in 8 aircraft. Passengers taking Air China Boeing 777-200 aircraft have already enjoyed the change brought by the cabin upgrades.

It is reported that Air China Boeing 777-200 cabin upgrade program is scheduled to be preceded within 39 days. The original 49 business class seats and 296 economy class seats will be changed into 30 business class seats, 63 premium economy class seats and 217 economy class seats, with a total reduction of 35 seats. Yang Guibin, the deputy general manager of the engineering department of Air China Engineering and Technology Branch Co., said: "After the cabin upgrade, the Boeing 777-200 will have fully lie-flat business class seats, the same as the new introduced Air China Boeing 777-300ER business class seats. It's very humane in both functionality and comfort."

At present, the first Boeing 777-200 aircraft has completed the new cabin configuration and seat replacement. The modification of the laptop power supply system and entertainment equipment is still ongoing. Another 9 aircraft cabin upgrade will be carried out successively, and the redesign duration of each aircraft is expected to be 14 days shorter than the first aircraft.