Starting in 1999, with Gillette’s backing, Emery convened some 50 focus groups in several countries with the goal of finding out what people really wanted in an airliner. “We’d hear the usual things—‘I can’t find my seat,’ ‘I don’t have enough room for my legs,’ ‘I went to the bathroom on an airplane once and I never want to do it again,’ ” he says. “We listened to all that. But we were looking for things that people really couldn’t articulate.”
To draw people out, Emery’s team would take 10 or 15 into a room and tell them that they were in charge of designing the world’s first jetliner cabin. No limitations. Or they would sit them next to the blank wall of a cabin mockup, give them a Magic Marker, and ask them to draw an ideal window. “Their deeper values began to come out,” says Emery. “Some things we couldn’t use, of course, such as elaborate overhead delivery systems for food to get carts out of the aisles. But one big lesson was the concept people have that as one walks down a jetway you’re feeling cramped because there are no windows, then you go through the door of the airplane and everything seems to get smaller and smaller.”
The windows, thanks to the carbon fiber fuselage, are almost 19 inches tall and 11 inches wide—as opposed to 15 by 10-plus inches in the 777. The larger windows not only brighten the interior but give passengers in middle seats a better view outside. In an added trick, the windows are dimmed electronically. Move a controller, and the window darkens as if by magic.
Making the 787 mostly out of carbon fiber (the aircraft fuselage is essentially “baked” in giant forms) created opportunities to indulge in other design niceties not possible with traditional aluminum. Aluminum airplanes can certainly have larger windows. But bigger window cutouts put more strain on the airframe. Carbon fiber handles the strains better than aluminum, so engineers could show a little flair and splurge on bigger windows without shortening the life of the airframe.