The gap between the pace of technology advancement outside the aircraft and within its passenger cabin — and especially in the digital technology deployed within seats — has never been so large. We sat down for an extensive discussion with Cathay Pacific’s general manager for customer experience and design Vivian Lo, to understand how digital product lifecycle strategy analysis is being incorporated at the design stage to make technology more effective and extend its lifespan.
Cathay Pacific never expected to launch its latest set of cabin upgrades, including the brand new Aria business class suite, as a retrofit via an MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) programme. But with the long delays to the Boeing 777-9 for which it was originally intended, the airline is installing the new cabins aboard its existing fleet of 777-300ERs before any factory-fresh versions. It’s the most technologically advanced cabin Cathay has ever created, with more digital features, more integration to the aircraft backend, and more upgradeability.
The digital design work, Lo tells us, stemmed from new collaborative and iterative design requirements: “One of the things that we’ve done well, since we had the business transformation in 2017, is ‘Design to Deliver’. Although I’m in charge of the design team, actually a very big part of my work is to ensure that we are closely collaborating with delivery teams to ensure we design something that can be delivered. So actually, a lot of the design decisions we made are together with inflight services, as well as with engineering.”
Integrating the operational, engineering and MRO expertise across Cathay and its sister companies brings critical input at a crucial time. “Their eyes are very different,” Lo says.
A more holistic view of the seat product lifecycle is also crucial, especially as the way that airliners are used, maintained, and moved between markets changes. In previous decades a particular widebody might have started off as a longhaul flagship, then following a major overhaul check moved to midhaul routes with a cabin change, then following its next overhaul check moved to shorter high-density routes with another cabin change.
The extension of the gaps between major overhauls, as well as the pioneering during the last two decades of operational concepts such as strategic underutilisation of longhaul aircraft for regional flights to increase flexibility, allows for a smaller and more focussed regional fleet to reduce operational complexity.
It does, however, mean that seats have to last for longer between major cabin seat replacements, especially given that seats are more complex and more expensive — and thus need to be right first time. As an example: the seats being replaced by the new Cathay programme were introduced in 2010, and with the approximately 24-month seat design cycle that means they were in the design phase around the time that the iPhone came out, and three years before the iPad.
This means that designers need to think not just about the current and next generation of technology, but a dozen or more generations into the future.
Lo recounts one seat design anecdote: “I remember when we were working on the designs, there was at that time, I think, the CEO and myself — we had clear requirements: it has to fit a 13-inch laptop. Then we wanted to make sure that like the storage would not only fit the 13-inch laptop, but that it would go in and out seamlessly, not in a strange way. And it shouldn’t scratch your laptop or your iPad as well — those small things that people take for granted.”
Developing a strong product lifecycle strategy is critical to modern high-tech seats
During the period of reflection that was in a way imposed on the industry during the COVID-19 shutdown, Lo and her colleagues delved deeply into questions around product lifecycle strategy.
“What is the product lifecycle? When do you do a refresh?” were some of the important questions, she says, with the future model to “try to start planning that from the start, from the acquisition point of an aircraft, so I think that will allow us to have much better managed cycles in the future.”
Fundamentally, Lo explains, “it needs to be strategic and theoretical from the start. You also need to be a bit practical to adapt based on where you are for that particular fleet, sometimes because they’re out of cycle already. We started looking at trends and history on products, key product trends, in terms of cabin products. The starting point is also thinking through the technology cycle, but then [also] the transformation of unbundling of TV sets and [their] ancillaries and the seat might allow us to change that: to be faster, so all those elements will go into the product definition lifecycle.”
Considering how advances in aviation-specific digital technology can be incorporated is crucial, informed by the progress of that technology compared with the increasingly short generations of consumer technology and the requirements for safety certification of screens.
“A lot of the history actually was also driven a lot more by technology trends: [Panasonic Avionics inflight entertainment and interactive information systems] eX1 through eX2 through eX3,” Lo says, highlighting a key element of the inflight digitalisation experience: the screen passengers see as the first thing when they sit down.
Here, the lifecycle of the graphic user interface, or GUI, is shorter than it’s ever been before, driven by advances in screen technology from non-touchscreen to resistive to capacitive touchscreens. At the same time, it also needs to evolve to account for other digital and technological innovations, like larger storage drives on board, RAID-style cabin cloud on-device storage, and cloud loading over the inflight connectivity.
“The old GUI was designed for a much, much smaller library before, so if you needed to go through all our content, the filter didn’t really work well,” Lo admits. “The new GUI is really actually designed based on the best-in-class experience that everyone is enjoying at home. But also, it gives visibility to the journey — there’s a lot of things that we’re very proud of.”
This journey visibility is crucial to unlocking the benefits of the digitalised passenger experience, including customisation, interactivity, personalisation and the extension of the airline’s brand contact to after the flight via ancillary partnerships.
When it comes to hardware, “hopefully, I think the suppliers will also make things more upgradable,” Lo says. “As you know, the device technology certified for onboard usage is at least ten years or a few cycles behind the consumer market. Even now, the latest offering of the wireless charging, is still the first-generation speed.”
Crucial to the way that new technologies arrive in the cabin, she concludes, is “thinking through the fact that you would need to upgrade at a certain stage, so that your design allows the progression of that — either as a kind of mid term kind of upgrade, or other kind of modular solutions.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 5th December 2024
