“All airlines are different. Their clients are different. The body types sometimes are different,” says Luke Pearson, a designer based in London who designed the seat with Lufthansa. The typical Lufthansa business-class passenger is a man in his mid-40s who travels for business every other month. Germans and Americans account for half of Lufthansa’s business passengers.

“Airlines need to know their demographics and what is their culture of travel. Lufthansa have a very good understanding of their clients,” Mr. Pearson says.

The airline says it received more than 3,500 mostly positive comments from passengers during the seat’s first months of service.

Still, while travelers prefer the new Lufthansa seat to its predecessor, the new seat has not won unanimous approval. Some frequent fliers have criticized Lufthansa’s decision not to offer direct aisle access, or the way passengers’ feet converge on the same footrest (although a partition separates them). One reviewer on the Business Traveller Web site said the V-shaped configuration was “nice if you are traveling with someone, but does make you feel a bit more duty-bound to speak to the person next to you if you are on your own, as there is no privacy screen to divide you.”

Another frequent flier offered this faint praise: “The new Lufthansa Business Class is leagues ahead of the old business class. This is due to the fact the Lufthansa had one of the poorer offerings on this class of service.”

When seats in the front of the cabin get more attention, they create a weight problem for the plane as a whole. Airlines, trying to trim weight to cut fuel costs, have sought to balance out heavier seats in the front, in part, by looking for slimmer and lighter seats in coach, ones in which the seat frame is made with high-grade aluminum or carbon composite rather than welded steel. Some connections are even made of titanium. Attention to such detail has become critical: cutting 2.2 pounds can save as much as $800 a year in fuel cost per seat, according to Mr. Hiller, the Recaro executive.

On one of its seats destined for short-haul domestic flights, Recaro moved the magazine seat pocket away from the knee area to the upper edge of the seat above the tray, providing a couple more inches of space. Bulky foam padding on seat cushions was replaced with mesh, like modern office chairs, and the backrest is about two inches thinner. The seat weighs just 11 kilograms (24 pounds), down from 20 kilograms for previous generations. It is also “prereclined” at a 15-degree angle but cannot be adjusted.