Got a question about seats.

While pilot seats have been covered in some detail elsewhere, I'll go over those a bit, then on to what I'm wanting to discuss.

Up until just before WW2, pilot seats were nothing more than glorified bench seats with a backing of some sort, anchored to the deck. In the 30's and on through WW2, the seat pan was designed to accommodate a parachute pack. After WW2, ejections seats came into vogue.

What I'm asking about is airliner passenger seat design.

I'm building a 1/48 scale model of an airliner prototype, a KHaI 3. As an airliner, it wasn't very large, and so the model isn't very large. The design incorporated a pair of gondolas over the center section to accommodate pilot and passengers.

There are no photos of this extant(the Soviet Union seems to have a rather sporadic record of photos of their early designs, although there were a few more obscure designs which have numbers of photos taken of them.

But, seeing as I have to take a certain amount of artistic license, I'd still prefer to have something which looks like it would be appropriate for the period.

So far, about the only seat design I've been able to come up with are the passenger seats of the MiG 8 Utka, a test design of the early 50s(parts of which were incorporated in the MiG21), which had tubular frames and cushions for the seat and back.

I might go with this, although if I can find photos of other early airliners' interiors showing the seats, I'd probably reconsider, such as those used in the Ford Trimotor(Tin Goose).

While in earlier posts, others have suggested perhaps wicker basket seats, I'm not sure.

Data on the early airliners, at least until the introduction of the DC3 is kind of hard to find.

Which is why I'm asking what I have asked.

Test results of MiG-8 were used in MiG-15, not in MiG-21.

In the 30's pilot seats of civil planes were very different, but always without accommodation for parachute pack. (Perhaps, it's supposed that pilot wouldn't bail out having passengers behind him.) Examples of seats: (1) flat bottom and bent (cylindrical) back, both of thin metal or plywood perforated to reduce weight; (2) flat plywood bottom and back of cord wound around simplest frame of steel tube.

If you need some graphic confirmation, I have a few ones...

Yes, I would appreciate the graphic confirmation.

Also I don't get you how you're going to use Po-2 landing gear (it's from your earlier post) for KhAI-3. KhAI-3 had main wheels 800 x 150 mm and tail wheels 700 x 120 mm, all on solid wheel hubs, while Po-2 had main wheels 700 x 125 mm and they were spoked (like in a bicycle).

Additional info on KhAI-3 you can find here:

http://www.airwar.ru/enc/cw1/hai3.html

If you can't read Russian, I can help. For graphics I'll give a separate link after some preparation.

A translation would be appreciated. Also, that is a very nice site, because there are a lot more designs to choose from. My Russian is very rudimentary at best.

As to the landing gear, when the 3-view was scaled up, the wheels in the PO2 kit fit, and the struts looked about right. Other than that, while I would've liked to have a completely accurate scale model, this was the best I could come up with under the circumstances. Also, I didn't know the exact dismensions of the wheels of either design. After all, one works with what one can get.

The seats in the Unicraft 1/72 kit are quite simple; plain square seat bottoms with rounded backs. They should be easy to build and be convincing through the windows.

Please go by the link http://files.mail.ru/1AJ2R5 and download file max_m_will.zip. Switch to English is on the lower blue band, at the right.