LAS VEGAS -- Spirit plans to refresh the interiors of its fleet of more than 130 aircraft.
In an interview Monday on the sidelines of the International Aviation Forecast Summit here, CEO Ted Christie said the retrofitted cabins will offer additional seat padding compared with Spirit's current seats as well as memory foam in the seats.
"It will be the next-generation seat. It will have a different seat cushion that will enhance comfort," he said.
Christie said Spirit will put full-size tray tables on the retrofitted planes, replacing the mini-tray tables the carrier currently deploys. Seatbacks will also be set with more recline than current Spirit seats, though they still won't move forward or backward from their set position.
Spirit plans to provide details of the planned retrofit at the Airline Passenger Experience exposition in Los Angeles, which begins on Sept. 9.
Christie also said that Spirit won't begin selling its first WiFi service until sometime next year. When the carrier first announced in May of last year that it planned to install WiFi, it expected to have its first WiFi-equipped planes flying last fall and the entire fleet finished by the second half of this year. However, said Christie, supply chain issues encountered by its WiFi vendor, Thales, as well as reliability problems with antennas, had forced the airline to revise its completion to the end of next year.
"I think that is going to go now into 2021, realistically," Christie said.
Spirit flies 10 aircraft that have been modified for WiFi, but only on a trial basis. It is not selling WiFi service. Christie said the carrier's 32 Airbus A321 planes will be the first to get WiFi.