Boeing Sky Interior_ More Space in the Sky

The flying public thinks about their flying experience. They think about being fairly confined, cramped space, and in general, they don't like it. They think, you know, I'm at point A, I want to be at point B, and darn, I have to get in a cramped airplane to get there. One of the areas where Boeing has been especially exciting is that we have gone to the flying public and used specialized methods to get at the deep psychological needs that people have inside an airplane. We take steps in our airplane design to meet those unarticulated needs. When we can discover those kinds of things, we can design accordingly. We would ask people to describe their ideal flight. And what they would say is, there's no one in the seat next to me, and I slept all the way. So the challenge is to recognize that space is both a matter of inches, but also there's a psychological dimension to space. We try to increase the sense of spaciousness. You walk in, and all of a sudden, there's all this space above you. There's kind of a psychological release from that compression. And that increases the sense of architectural depth in the airplane. The physical shape of the bins that are going up and away from you, so you have an increase in physical space there, but also you have an increase in psychological space because of the sense of nothing above you. If your brain sees more pathways and places to go, a place will feel bigger, whether it's physically bigger or not. We are doing in-flight research now on how you feel emotionally, how you feel physically, and then your perception of a whole bunch of elements as being a significantly better experience. So we literally raised the bar.