An interior specialist innovates while making cabins more sustainable
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As business jet cabin requirements from operators have become increasingly sophisticated and bespoke, interiors specialists have had to become more innovative.
Among the specialists doubling down on new concepts is Austria-based luxury cabin materials specialist F/List. The family-run company opened as a carpentry shop more than 70 years ago and since has gained business aviation customers including OEMs Bombardier, Embraer, Gulfstream and Pilatus, as well as agreements with MRO providers and completion centers. Its work extends to commercial airline customers, which use its stone veneers to accentuate cabin seats and tables.
CEO Katharina List-Nagl, granddaughter of the company’s founder, has targeted partnering with startups, architects and designers to refine product developments. Through its in-house future lab incubator F/Lab, set up in 2020, the company looks to accelerate innovation in products it designs, manufactures and for some items, maintains.
F/List employs more than 900 people across its global network of nine subsidiaries. Credit: F/List
Over the past year, F/List introduced new materials, created in-house, designed to be customizable and sustainable. These materials including aenigma, linfinium and whisper leather, a sustainable alternative to real leather made from corn starch. F/List says this material is installed on an unnamed private customer’s aircraft. Melanie Prince, head of innovation at F/List, says newly developed materials such as this usually undergo flammability, adherence, robustness and fluid-resistance tests. In the case of the whisper leather, it underwent a Blue Angel environmental label test in Germany for volatile organic compounds, which typically lasts for 30 days to determine if there are any toxic emissions, but after just seven days the whisper leather produced zero emissions.
Among the recent products born out of the F/Lab is the F/L Shapeshifter, a series of concepts that use bio-based materials with pneumatic functions and actuators to allow flexibility even in wood-based veneers. One moveable component, the F/L Shapeshifter Credenza, is a sideboard cabinet designed as a space-saving unit for small interiors that can be used to stow audio-visual equipment, loose cabin items and soft furnishings such as blankets. “When we think of credenzas in an aircraft, we immediately think of doors and trying to make them as wide as the aisle way and this isn’t convenient in general,” says Prince. “We decided that with morphing components, we would be able to do something very special by bending it around the edge so the wood veneer will bend around the corner and there will no longer be a need for a door or a gap.”
As part of its wider sustainability efforts, the company’s Thomasberg facility is powered by solar and renewable energy, combined with smart-energy recovery. Its headquarters also features machinery and systems with heat recovery, a cooling system that uses water from the adjacent river, 100% LED lighting, and charging of on-site electric golf carts, e-scooters and e-bikes using the Okovolt electricity filling station.
Creating new products in a sustainable fashion is also a primary objective. One way to do this is by recycling materials for future products, such as incorporating previously used leather skins on chairs and tables in aircraft interiors.
Prince demonstrated a material surface coated in dust from F/List’s stone production. “They create the stone floor, polish it, cut it and then we take the dust back and bring it back into the product,” she says. “This gives a natural surface that is very robust and hard to scratch,” adding that such products are customizable and can be made from any texture and surface including mother-of-pearl finishes and patterns.
One example of this is taking a pre-existing skin and replicating a stingray leather, made from the upper portion of a stingray, with non-animal bases before adding customization to it. F/List’s sustainability goals also extend to mother-of-pearl pieces recycled from clothing. “We take broken buttons and grind them down and then we bring that back into the material and are able to modify the patterns, textures, height, colors and composition,” Prince says. Other initiatives include developing alternatives to granite, used in countertops and flooring on aircraft, which are designed to be slightly lighter than the material it imitates.
F/List aims for the perfect mix of customizable and sustainable by experimenting with mixing linseed oil with recycled Portuguese cork for aircraft flooring and bedrooms. Due to concerns over the softness of the cork, its R&D teams mixed the cork with apricot pips and bound them together with linseed oil. “In terms of density, this mix was very interesting,” Prince says. “This is lighter, acoustically it’s very favorable and fairly robust, and it’s all very natural and non-toxic.”
F/List employs more than 900 people across its global network, with branches in Dubai; Sorocaba (Brazil); Montreal, the U.S. and Europe. It plans to grow capacity at its Savannah, Georgia location with a 9,600 ft.2 facility scheduled to be operational by the end of 2023. It will incorporate veneer production, an on-site design showroom and after-sales services.
—As Aviation Week's MRO Editor EMEA, James Pozzi covers the latest industry news from the European region and beyond. He also writes in-depth features on the commercial aftermarket for Inside MRO.
