What if you could pay extra on your next flight to make it feel more like a cruise ship, with
access to a daycare, a coworking space, or a full restaurant and bar?
For most people, flying is terrible.
But the next level of flying might be modular cabin experiences, ones that are loaded onto
the plane in between flights — and are supposed to be accessible to everyone.
Here we go!
This is Transpose.
It’s a modular cabin project that Airbus has been developing inside its Silicon Valley
labs, called A³.
The engineers on the project are taking inspiration from cargo planes and applying the same loading
and unloading concept to passenger planes.
Cargo planes, like the kind used by shipping companies, often load and unload cargo using
giant pallets that are moved throughout the aircraft on rollers.
The minds at Airbus think that you could replace that cargo with an experience; the idea being
it could both improve travel for consumers and give the airlines and other brands opportunities
to charge them for it.
Now this isn’t a real plane, it’s a mock up in the labs.
But it’s modeled after the Airbus A330.
Jason Chua, one of the Transpose executives who previously worked on Motorola’s modular
phone project, gave me a tour of the plane.
We are boarding through the door four area.
And we're going to enter the plane from the rear.
This first experience we’re entering here is a sleeping area.
Unlike business class right now, which takes up a lot of room, we're actually stacking
four people vertically, which makes it a lot more financially viable.
Another thing that airplane cabins today aren't really designed for
is traveling in groups of friends or sports teams
or just with families with young kids.
This is a place where families can really spend some good time together.
These seats actually flip down and creates this large open space
for kids to sit down and play with trucks and stuff like that.
So this is a restaurant area. In flight, this looks like a cocktail table,
but for taxi, take-off, and landing...
grab this, and you can sit down and buckle in.
You can imagine that, you can grab a cup of coffee from a restaurant
and come back here, and take a seat, and get some work done.
It's kind of crazy to think that we might have these really cool pods
before we have really consistent working Wi-Fi in airplanes.
Airbus has imagined other scenarios for a modular cabin that we didn’t get to try
first hand — things like a cycling studio, or a day spa, or a name-brand coffee shop.
And they’re experimenting with state-of-the-art, three-millimeter OLED displays that would act
as “windows,” showing a cotton candy sky while you’re actually trapped in a metal tube.
All of this might make you think that this will inevitably be something that only the
rich can afford, but Chua says that while the airlines will ultimately
determine pricing, Airbus imagines these experiences will be priced
at the premium economy level, if they’re able to maintain
the same seating density.
He also says he thinks people will use the modules like they do on a cruise ship,
roaming around freely on the plane.
We want to make flying feel more human, so this could be your office,
or your coworking space, the restaurant, could be any nice restaurant.
We want people to feel more at home when they fly rather than
like they are trying to fit into something that's not been designed for them.
So, I’ve done a lot of “hands on” videos before, but I’ll say this: I’ve never
done a hands on with a plane.
At least, until now.
The engineers let me help load one of the modules onto the aircraft.
You know, you're just loosening it, I've got it.
Oh, it doesn't look like you have much room to go through there.
I say this like I know.
In order to load a module onto the plane, they’re partly relying on the existing infrastructure
from a cargo aircraft.
But they removed the ball mat and rollers that are normally used, saving about a ton
of weight in the process.
Instead, they embedded eight aircasters into the module.
These are built to withstand up to 16,000 pounds — which is well within
the maximum weight of a fully loaded, 10,000 pound module.
And all of this is happening remarkably fast, at least in the labs.
The Transpose team claims it can swap out an entirely new module in well under an hour.
So right now aircraft take about 30 days to do a change of a cabin, and we're trying
to take that customization period from 30 days to about 30 minutes.
We’re actually targeting about 15 minutes per module at this point.
How can you be sure that everything is safe, and secure, and sealed
in that amount of time?
We’re actually using proven engineering connections, so seat-track attachments
which is what connect our current seats to the aircraft.
We're using those same exact connections points.
We're using the same exact processes that cargo aircrafts use for loading onboard an aircraft.
We use a lot of this existing work and then we change the things we want to change,
like the experiences and the way the cabin is architected.
That doesn’t mean the Tranpose team has it all figured out just yet.
There are still other safety and design aspects to consider — things like the placement
and accessibility of oxygen masks, how quickly it will take people to get into their seats
if there’s turbulence, or even how doors might be designed differently in a modular cabin.
We’ve got an additional floor structure that’s on top of something
that wasn’t meant to handle that additional floor structure.
Even though it’s a really small floor structure, about two inches,
you have to handle that two inches,
slope down to the actually door.
Trying to solve something to where you're not taking up any
existing cabin interior space is something that we're still
in the process of brainstorming.
Another element the Transpose team has had to consider is the human element.
How will people move throughout the plane if they’re all allowed to wander around?
Will people argue or gripe even more than they do on planes now?
In December, we did a test at Crissy Field, where we did a very low resolution flight
with 66 passengers on board. It showed us some really interesting stuff.
Like, one is if you don’t tell people what’s on board an airplane everyone
kind of knows what the learned behavior is, you go in and sit in your seat.
What we found was that slowly people started getting up
and kind of going to the bar or restaurant.
Soon people got the idea that, "Oh, we don’t have to stay in our seats.
There is actually reasons to get up and move around."
It also showed us when you have a lot of passengers moving around,
it is a different experience.
But applying some simple traffic rule ideas, passengers can quickly
figure out how to kind of navigate the cabin in a new way.
Even if Airbus gets the modules perfectly engineered, and thinks it has come up with
the right guidelines for human interaction, there’s still another big hurdle to consider:
approval from the FAA and international regulators.
Is it realistic to think this could be in the skies within in the next couple of years?
Absolutely.
Of course, our number one priority of this project is safety.
We’ve had lots of good conversations with both the FAA and IASA
around how we can get this thing flying. And we’ve gotten some really good
feedback from them about how we can get this thing flying within the next couple years.
But that may be an aggressive timeline, according to one analyst I spoke to.
Even though it is only an interior concept, FAA regulations are incredibly strict, and
there’s usually a lot of back and forth between the administration and manufacturers
when it comes to a new project.
The FAA wouldn’t comment on this specific project, but it told me that the certification
process can range from less than one year to more than five years, depending on the
applicant’s experience and the complexity of the project.
At the very least, Airbus certainly has a lot of experience building planes.
It’s an ambitious concept, when you consider the engineering that goes into it, the potential
regulatory hurdles, and the fact that most airlines only change their cabins every seven
to ten years.
Even if it does get approval — there are still the economics to consider.
But Airbus thinks, if it does take off, that it can eliminate the downtime that’s required
for customizable cabins, which means more money for the airlines.
There’s also the possibility it could make flying a lot less onerous for people.
And really, who wouldn’t want that.