I like this idea for making the middle seat on airplanes just a bit more spacious and comfortable than the others, so people wouldn’t mind it so much and might even prefer it.

But if Molon Labe Designs gets its way, that panic could give way to placidity. The upstart Colorado aviation design firm wants to kill the middle seat’s middle child reputation. Its “stagger seat” concept sits slightly below and behind its neighbors, so it can be three inches wider than its window- and aisle-adjacent companions. It has its own armrests.

“Flying sucks, and design makes it suck less,” says Hank Scott, the CEO of Molon Labe, who’s currently in Germany to show off the prototype at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg. (BMW Groups’ Designworks and Panasonic Avionics also had a hand in the design.) By extending curved armrest back, the designers ensure the middle seater has access to at least half of its length. (“If you’re in the aisle or window seat, you couldn’t possibly steal the entire armrest—your elbows would be behind your back at a weird angle,” Scott says.) That also gives the middle seat’s in-flight entertainment system room to grow to a whopping 18 inches, compared to the puny 15-inch screens on other seat backs. For all this design prowess, however, this thing gets you nothing in extra legroom.