This final note on the way out today, which, as happens every so often, I wish I were making up but sadly am not.

This item is courtesy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Airbus, the commercial jet maker. There’s a patent application that would — and again, I’m not making this up — stack passengers seats on commercial airliners vertically.

Image via U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

“In order to still more efficiently use the space in a passenger cabin of an aircraft, this patent proposes to position an elevated deck structure in the passenger cabin of a wide-body aircraft for providing a mezzanine seating area in a substantially unused upper lobe of the aircraft fuselage,” the application states. 

Mezzanine seating — sounds almost luxurious, doesn’t it?