There’s one section of the new Future of Flight where visitors will not only learn about what’s next in commercial aviation, they’ll have a chance to shape it.
Michael O’Leary / The Herald
Boeing is moving its Passenger Experience Research Center to the Future of Flight.
The center, a mock-up of the interior of an airline passenger cabin, is part of the Passenger Experience Zone at the museum. Boeing has been using it for the past four years to test various concepts.
The extra-large windows that are expected to be a hallmark of the new 787 were first tested on volunteers seated in the research center. Boeing also has tested alternative seating configurations, new lavatory signs and new lighting systems, said Blake Emery, Boeing’s director of differentiation strategy.
“It’s been a great vehicle to test things like the impact of aisle width on boarding and de-planing,” Emery said. “It’s the very simple mundane things that are important in airplanes.”
The research center was based on the dimensions of a 767 cabin, but it’s designed so engineers can change the size to test how people react to any number of proposed new cabin features.
“It gives you a vehicle where you can manipulate variables, do empirical research and validate concepts,” Emery said.
The research center has bounced around Puget Sound trying to find a home.
At first it was in a tent next to the old Boeing tour center in Everett. Remodeling at that site forced a move to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it once again was displaced when that museum built its Personal Courage Wing, which opened last year.
By moving into the Future of Flight, the center will finally come indoors, which is a good thing, Emery said. In one windstorm, “we just about lost the tent,” he said. “It sounded like it was in a real jet, the wind was so loud.”
Having the research center in the Future of Flight is “a great fit,” Emery said.
“The prime advantage,” he said, “is that it’s a public location, so you don’t have any security issues with getting people into a Boeing gate. We’ll have access to the thousands of people who are visiting the Boeing tour every year.”
The research center probably won’t be operational at the Future of Flight until February. Emery said his teams are working out exactly what kind of tests they’ll run first, but cabin lighting experiments will be among the first.
The 787 has an “incredible LED lighting system,” he said, and Boeing wants data to give airlines on which combinations make passengers more comfortable – and which don’t.
As an investment, the research center has already paid for itself with what Boeing learned about 787 windows, Emery said.
“Millions and millions of people are going to experience that on the Dreamliner; that’s going to be huge,” he said.
And now, “I’m so glad that it’s going to go into the Future of Flight,” Emery said. “That space is such a perfect fit, and now the general public has a chance to participate.”
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