Hi! We’re live from Farnborough International Airshow, a major event for the Aerospace industry. For those of you not attending the event, we thought you might be interested in following a dedicated Farnborough newsroom we prepared for you using Netvibes technology 🙂 You will find there live tweets, press articles and blog posts from the event. We’ll also come up with a few blog posts this week! 🙂

So today was the first commercial (Qatar Airways) in-flight display of Boeing’s “Dreamliner” 787:

Seeing the 787 reminded me of this interview where our own Aerospace VP Mich Tellier mentions Boeing’s focus on the “passenger experience” as a starting point of their approach:

What is new is how Boeing approached the customer experience. They said, “Okay, I’m not going to focus on what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years.” They were not merely going to improve the seat cost and availability model, which is the economic model for the airline. They said, “I’m going to look at passenger experience.” […] They wanted to increase humidity and reduce cabin altitude to 4000 feet from its current 8000 feet. That would kill a metallic fuselage, which is one of the reasons they chose a composite fuselage.

Putting the consumer experience (e.g., increasing humidity in the cabin for improved comfort as aforementioned) at the heart of the innovation process has dramatic impacts on the way the aircraft and interiors are specified, designed, and tested. I’ll try to address some of those points in the upcoming posts.

What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts about it.