Keywords

1 Introduction

Owing to the rapid growth of civil aviation transportation around the world, an increasing number of people tend to choose aircraft to travel. However, this potential market isn’t always a good sign to airways, the demands of passengers are also changing rapidly, which could be more diversified and difficult to handle. The competition among airways are getting more fierce and complicated, traditional operation methods are faced with challenges. Spending as much as possible to upgrade passengers comfort during flight might no longer be a totally right direction when designers and operators making decisions, they have to weigh on passenger needs and costs, even satisfy “mean” but “tough” clients. Oancea [1] finds that in recent years many airlines seem to restore profitability to focus on economy class, traditional first class somehow have lost their attractiveness to the market, then set the opinion that the operations of first class should be redefined to attract clients.

Passenger experience could be one of the essential issues for people to choose airlines. In the past several years, the concept of Dream liner from Boeing (Fig. 1) has been paid great attention by the public around the world. Although it can be likely regarded as an advertise strategy, it still paid off in the new series of Boeing products and forecasts a tendency of upgrading passenger experience throughout the whole civil aviation industry. Moreover, as the internet technology and related market are becoming more widespread and mature, more online services can be provided on board, passenger experience during air travel could be completely different.

Fig. 1.
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(Source: http://teague.com/work/a-job)

Boeing’s concept of Dream Liner

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Upgrading passenger experience is ambitious and meaningful, however, this issue is also faced with new challenges. Modern life mode and communication among cultures somehow influence diversity of passenger demands and passenger’s preservation of comfort. Nowadays, people are not that easily satisfied with previous cabin facilities and services, and they tend to care more about individual choices and costs at the same time; Meanwhile, as more and more passengers from different backgrounds choose air travel, demands might be harder to satisfy, misunderstanding also exists.

The target population are also changing rapidly. In China, the development of aviation transportation is highly supported, many cities and towns are having their new airports and commercial air commuting systems, which will give more travel opportunity to located people in a short future. In the meantime, many new passengers who aren’t quite familiar with air travel may be harder to enjoy the trip during the flight. According to Wang and Li [2], passengers who experienced a lot in air travel are more likely to stay calm during the flight or even come across unusual situations, which means passengers who lack of air travel experience are more likely to be trapped with negative emotions. On the other hand, in foreign countries, the U.S., for example, Cho and Min [3] found that passenger characteristics has significantly changed in 10 years (2005–2015) by examining longitudinal changes of passengers with low-cost carriers (LCCs) and legacy carriers (or non-LCCs).

We explain a brief life cycle of a product and how passenger experience related to it (Fig. 2). Even as complicated as commercial aircraft project, the process is still similar. Develo** an aircraft would experience several steps like concept design, detailed design, manufacturing, sales, operation, and finally obsolete after decades or even longer. During this process, it would be modified many times according to feedback from sales and customers. If the value of user experience needs to be improved, everyone should notice it’s a challenge of combining different systems.

Fig. 2.
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A brief life cycle of a product - commercial aircraft

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2 Passenger Experience

Consideration of passenger experience should be assimilated into aircraft’s life cycle in order to make the product greater. Customer’s feedback of experience on board easily influences sales and operations. If operation methods couldn’t solve problems well, the negative feedback may push airlines and OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) to modify cabin design and facilities. In order to treat customer more effectively, customized refitting service which helps airlines to put their own needs into reality is another way (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
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Passenger experience related to commercial aircraft’s life cycle

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Passenger experience isn’t a new field, some researchers define issues relate to passenger experience as comfort. Passenger comfort on board has been discussed over decades. It’s widely known that passenger comfort should be taken seriously because a lower rating can make passengers not want to fly again. And now the research of passenger experience, i.e. passenger comfort, has benefited a lot in improving air transportation industry. Budd, Warren and Bell [4] give passenger health advice after a study of promoting passenger comfort and wellbeing during the flight; Nicolini and Salini [5] use related concepts and methods to evaluate customer satisfaction and complete a case study of British Airways. While now comfort somehow chouldn’t contain every concern of develo** new products because not all the passengers want to pursue superlative comfort, they tend to treat comfort as an intangible product or service to purchase instead. Moreover, develo** a product that take care of passenger experience are becoming a multi-major and systems engineering task.

In order to simplify existing tasks, these recent research can be roughly classified as several directions: focusing on health and human needs; Focusing on design process, which mainly help designers making decisions by finding connections between function and customer demands; focusing on operations, which mainly help airlines to observe passengers’ reactions and choices, then forecast the tendency of air transportation market.

2.1 Factors Related to Human Needs

Recent study of passenger needs contains knowledge of medical science, psychology, social science, culture and etc. Although this is a cross-over issue, researchers are creating models to identify and explain it. For example, Patel and D’Cruz [6] suggest that passenger comfort contains internal factors and external factors, and create a new model of aircraft passengers’ comfort by collecting and summarizing recent research results (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.
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(Source: [6])

Model of key factors which influence aircraft passengers’ comfort

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On the other hand, increasing kinds of design focus on children, mom with enfants, elder or disabled people. Barrier-free design also can be seen on new series of commercial aircrafts.

In the meantime, several specific situations are also put under the spotlight, negative symptoms like dizzy, tinnitus, negative emotions like irritability, anxiety, etc. Lindseth [7] claimed that flight anxiety of student pilots were identified, while Li, Li, Wang et al. [8] observe the situation of passengers flight anxiety are also exist by collecting and analyzing more than 2500 questionnaires. Ren and Tang [9] examined group emergency events especially air-passengers who come across delays become irritable and even influence others to escalate the situation, in order to prevent or at least reduce negative impacts like the serious social and economic losses and even casualties.

2.2 Factors Related to Product Functions and Operations

Finding factors related to products means finding customer demands and product design and engineering, which would be a gap in practical application. Ahmadpour, Robert, Lindgaard [10] create a comfort model of passengers’ emotions in the base of the emotion model by Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC), which connect cabin design factors with human fundamental needs (Fig. 5). In this case, they are searching links between demands and design process.

Fig. 5.
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(Source: [10])

The cognitive structure of passengers’ emotions in relation to comfort, illustrating the appraisal patterns of passengers’ affective reactions to the aircraft interior during the flight (adopting and revising the cognitive structure of emotions by Ortony, Clore, and Collins, 1988).

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3 Passenger Experience and Cabin Design

In passenger experience related to cabin design process, designers from different majors are getting together to complete a design project. According to the results above, cabin design process can be roughly concluded as these factors below:

  • Seats

  • Cabin Configuration & fundamental facilities

  • Environment control

  • IFE(In-flight entertainment) facilities

  • Aesthetic design

  • …

There are many methods to cope with these factors. For example, In design related to ergonomics, Vink, Bazley, Kamp, Blok [11] find that some design factors such as legroom, seat, personal space are clearly related to passenger comfort; Furthermore, recently there are many programs to simulate real situation, such as JACK, RAMSIS and etc., could help designer improve design quality.

In cabin configuration, Delcea, Cotfas, Crăciun and Molanescu [12] simulate several different boarding methods to find out the most effective method; In design related to environment, Pang, Li, Bai, Liu, Zhou, Yao [13] simulate airflow feature of different cabin structures and find relatively reasonable design. Moreover, new simulation tools can be used to improve design effectiveness, but making real shape model to take experiments is still a traditional and effective process to find design flaws. It doesn’t mean that simulation can solve everything, knowledge and practical experience can’t be ignored.

Furthermore, Wi-Fi & satellite communication technology supports aircraft owners to develop extra interconnection services, which also means passenger entertainment can be upgraded. In a short future, passengers have chance to enjoy massive online services on board, and IFE facilities will be innovated dramatically to fit with this new tendency. Passenger will not only use traditional IFE systems on board, but also use their own devices. Servers on board will be a transfer station of informations, massive entertainment resources could be collected and shared to passengers.

4 Passenger Experience and Operations

In the field of operations, passenger experience is helped to make customer segmentation. Airlines classify their customers into different groups to provide targeting service, which is the most common method to use. According to Teichert, Shehu, von Wartburg [14], many airlines have common sense of separating business class and economy class, which limits customer’s choice, and they suggest airlines should reevaluate their market and customers.

In recent years, an powerful support of defining customers’ needs is using big data analysis. For example, Gong, Pu, Zhang, Wu [15] uses the K-means clustering method to analyze passenger segmentation, and finally bring out targeting service packages. Those packages can be consisted by giving passenger different services, entertainment devices, more luggage rooms, or more extra food or drinks, etc. Nowadays, although it’s common for airlines to take focus on passenger value, the research still shows the tendency of caring more about passenger experience, which shows modern passengers tend to be keen on choosing what they want, and airlines can also benefit from this mode. Many airlines use strategies like selling seats which have more legroom, selling luggage room through extra payment, etc. As internet technology available to use, more online services and new forms of online activities could be improved, which would be more attractive and valuable to young people.

According to the results above, operation process can be roughly concluded as these factors below:

  • Service

  • Commodity (Food, Drinks…) supplies

  • Personal/organized entertainment activities

  • Extended Service based on Facilities

  • …

Meanwhile, in design and marketing fields, there are researchers use customer portrait, Application of Scenario, etc., to verify customer demands and the strategy of products. Liu, Jiang, Li [16] define customer demands by designing and simulating an almost real scene of customer using target products. This kind of method can more or less be seen in some commercial aircraft passenger studies, but still has lots of unknown areas to be explored.

5 A New Model of Passenger Experience

In the sight of a life cycle of commercial aircraft, connection between cabin design and operations need to be determined for improving passenger experience. We combine these points above to recreate a model of passenger experience (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6.
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Model of passenger experience related to cabin design & operations

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This model depicts the relationship among passenger experience on board, cabin design and operations, in which user-centric idea is conveyed. We classify passenger experience as physical needs and mental needs, by corresponding those points to design factors and operation factors, revisit the definition of passenger experience.

6 Conclusions

Passenger experience of commercial aircraft could be a long-time issue to be discussed. In this study we review the previous fundamental research which may be related to passenger experience, some research defined experience as passenger comfort. In the previous years, researchers has observed a lot of valuable results, and several kinds of comfort models have been built.

Then we explain the brief life cycle of a product and how passenger experience related to it. In this study we noticed that if the value of user experience needs to be improved, definitely it’s an issue of combining different systems. In this case, we try to take a look at passenger experience issue by two sights: cabin design and operations.

The first step is to take focus on human fundamental needs. Several researchers use questionnaire and comfort model to define passenger comfort, while some other researchers use physical and psychological methods to find potential needs. These results contribute to the fundamental definition of passenger experience.

The second step is to find the relationship between human needs and design methods, which is the design sight. In cabin design, researchers and designers use different tools to make their products more comfortable and attractive. Several new tools are used to assist design process, such as environment simulation, 3D human body modeling, which may help designers more ergonomic design works. As the feedback turns out to be clear and convincible, designers are forced to think more effective design to improve functions or fill flaws.

The third step is to observe how the design performs in operations, which is the operations sight. Airways use big data to forecast passengers needs and how they perform. In this case, Passenger segmentation methods are considered, researchers analyse thousands of passengers to find out similarities and diversities. In recent years, increasing amount of research results show that passengers tend to care more about their personnalites, experiences and value than previous times, young passengers are more sensitive to costs so that they tend to choose less comfortable but cheap travels, etc. Passenger value is also a strength point to be mentioned, operators should weigh on balance. Nowadays, airways put more attention to improving their corporation images. Stylized and targeting cabin design could be more helpful to create a good image in passenger’s minds and also comfort passengers. Meanwhile, passenger experience and demands are influencing cabin design, operation costs, customer value, in-flight services, potential incomes, etc. Which means both designers and operators should focus on the same issue to weigh on passenger comfort and restrictions.

Finally, we combine these points above to recreate a model of passenger experience, in which cabin design and operations are taken into consideration.

Although the new model has been created, we know that there are so many research results that still not be included in this study. This direction has a lot of unknown area which need to take long time to study further. The gap between design and operations of passenger experience still remains, and we notice that there’s unknown knowledge which needs to explore.