EVERETT – This is what you get when George Jetson meets the Maytag repairman: dream-like airline lavatories and 21st- century showers for the sky.
They’re the products of a unit that the Boeing Co. calls its Payload Concepts Center, a group of engineers, artists and industrial designers who work outside the Boeing gate and way outside the box.
“We’re really looking for ideas,” said Doug Ackerman, the center’s manager. “That’s not something that Boeing traditionally focuses on. We typically focus on strong engineering solutions.”
The 5-year-old concepts center, located in leased office space off Seaway Boulevard, is not your father’s Boeing. It’s probably the only unit of Boeing to publish its own children’s book – “Flying With Bobby,” which outlined some factors of flying with children.
Its mission is oriented toward the far horizon, not the bottom line: What’s the future of flying look like and how will airplanes have to change to meet it?
The team works with in-house experts, consultants and university students to come up with ideas for things “so out-of-the-box we haven’t thought of it,” Ackerman said.
The students are his favorites, Ackerman said. “They don’t know what you can’t do.”
Not all of the concept center’s projects are pie-in-the-sky. The group has built a full-size mock-up of the tail of a 7E7, where it is working out the best ways to assemble and install the Dreamliners’ new interiors.
“This is where it’ll be proven before we get it on the factory floor,” Ackerman said. “So far, it’s pretty good.”
Similarly, the team is made up of traditional payload, manufacturing and human factors engineers.
But the approach is not traditional. Ackerman’s team includes a part-time caterer, a couple of amateur musicians and a tattoo artist, and he sends them off to Disney for creativity training.
“We went out looking for creative people,” Ackerman said. “We’re asking them to use all their talents.”
Assign these people to work on airplane interiors, and you get concepts such as the misting shower.
The idea was actually swiped from Airbus. Early ads for the A380 played up the idea that there would be space for deluxe amenities on the new superjumbos. One of the drawings depicted a curvaceous woman stepping out of a shower, while her traveling partner, a man, sat on the edge of the bed in their sky suite.
The ad caught the eye of Boeing engineers, who scoffed and snickered. You can’t just buy hot- water tanks and showers from Home Depot and install them on an airliner.
But they took it as a challenge, Ackerman said. “Let’s see what could be done.”
The problem is weight.
Water is heavy – about 8.3 pounds per gallon. A 1994 Princeton University study showed that the average person takes about a 121/2-minute shower, which uses 41.1 gallons – or 325 pounds – of water per person.
That’s fine if you’re flying with a few people on a Boeing Business Jet, Ackerman said. “If you can afford a BBJ, you can afford to carry the water.”
But it would require tons of water to bathe the hundreds of passengers on a trans-ocean widebody jet.
Aside from the water issues, there were other problems – how to get people through the shower quickly and how to do all this without creating a lot of extra work for flight attendants.
The solution was something basic and grounded. The misting shower “pretty clearly mimics what you’d see in a car wash,” Ackerman said.
The prototype misting shower has two chambers, one for changing, one for showering. When a passenger enters the changing chamber, he or she starts an automated 12-minute cycle.
Warm air heats up the shower chamber while the user undresses. When the user steps inside the shower, he or she is wetted down with a spray mist. The mist shuts off automatically, and the user gets a few minutes to scrub with anti-bacterial soap.
The spray comes back on, allowing the user to rinse off, and then a blower comes on to dry the passenger off, which eliminates the need for anything more than a hand towel.
Once the passenger steps out of the shower, a disinfectant is sprayed on the surfaces so they’re clean for the next user.
The whole process uses only 42 ounces of water per person – “about two of those Aquafina bottles,” Ackerman said.
It’s not the same as a long, hot shower on the ground, but test users say it is refreshing, he said.
Boeing is filing for patents on the system, which debuted recently at an air show in Hamburg, Germany, where the concepts group gleefully told Airbus representatives that “We’d be happy to license that intellectual property if they’d put a Boeing-branded shower on the A380,” Ackerman said.
There’s not a huge market for the showers, he acknowledged.
“We got some very, very strong responses from a couple of airlines,” he said, but the only potential buyers would be “airlines that are going to run a really high-end first class, and there aren’t a lot of them.”
But the shower could be an option on Boeing’s new 777-200LR, the super-long-range jet that will take passengers on 18-hour flights on routes such as New York to Hong Kong.
Boeing’s also considering whether to offer it as a built-in amenity on Boeing Business Jets. And there could be markets on the ground, Ackerman said: recreational vehicles, or even military sales to provide hygiene for soldiers in the desert.
The concepts built into the misting shower and other products could someday lead to features that will become standard on 21st-century airplanes, Ackerman said.
That’s the goal of the concept center, he said. “Sometimes it’s important to spend a bit of money on wild ideas.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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