You’ve just taken delivery of your aircraft. The interior is gorgeous, with hand-selected leathers, bespoke cabinetry and a lighting scheme that looks like something from a glossy design magazine. You wake up on your first long-haul flight and walk to the lavatory to freshen up. The water runs warm for about a minute but then turns ice cold. Someone specified a small tank heater rather than a flow-through unit. A tank that holds about four litres at 30 degrees Celsius. Once it’s empty, you’re washing with water that’s been sitting in the cargo compartment at about five degrees. You’ve spent $100 million on this aircraft, and you can’t finish shaving in comfort.
But this isn’t a design failure – at least, in any way most people would recognise. The lavatory looks immaculate, the fixtures are beautiful and the layout works perfectly. But the actual experience of using it, the thing that will shape how you feel about this cabin on every single flight, was determined by an engineering specification that most clients never think about or even know exists.
The aviation industry talks constantly about cabin design. Browse any completion centre’s portfolio and you’ll see familiar language when they talk about the “design vision” or show you a material palette and samples of bespoke craftsmanship. And – to be clear – those absolutely matter. But they only represent one part of what makes a cabin work – unfortunately, it’s not the part that determines whether you genuinely love being in the aircraft or find yourself quietly frustrated by it, flight after flight. It’s not a problem exclusive to aviation though: we can see the effect, and the solution, in other industries. Hospitality, for example, learned this the hard way.
There was a time when hotel quality was understood primarily through interior design. A high-end beautiful lobby with dramatic centrepieces, careful use of space, and aesthetically stunning rooms with rich furnishings are the usual markers designating a prestigious hotel. But guest surveys and reviews started showing something less obvious but more uncomfortable: guest satisfaction correlated poorly with aesthetic investment.
A beautifully designed suite could still generate complaints if the blackout curtains leaked light at the edges, or if the shower took ninety seconds to reach temperature. If the desk had no accessible power outlet and you could hear the couple next door arguing, the furnishings didn’t ameliorate the feeling of satisfaction. The discipline that emerged to address all of this, guest experience design, now sits alongside traditional interior design in every serious hospitality group. The best hotels invest as much in one as the other, because they learned, expensively, that how a guest experiences a room in and how it looks in a photograph are two very different things.
Aircraft cabins present the same challenge, compressed into a far more demanding environment. Consider just a few of the decisions that will quietly define how your experience over years of ownership.
Take that beautiful leather you selected for the seating. The sample looked and smelt wonderful – and felt soft and supple under your hand during the factory visit. But every material on a private aircraft must pass flammability certification, and some leathers require treatment to meet those standards. Certain hides take that treatment beautifully and age gracefully. Others become brittle within a few years, cracking and losing the very qualities that made you choose them. A fabric that feels perfect in a showroom may not be certifiable at all or may need a treatment that fundamentally changes its character. Your designer can show you how it looks; someone else needs to tell you how it will live.
The galley is another area where common sense from the ground gets lost somewhere above the clouds. Walk into any well-designed kitchen and you’ll find stone, tile, or hardwood flooring. Nobody carpets their kitchen. And yet galley areas on private aircraft are routinely carpeted. Customs agents don’t take their shoes off when they board. Flight crew are moving through with catering, drinks, equipment. In winter, boots track snow and de-icing fluid straight onto that carpet. A hard surface with underfloor heating keeps the area clean, comfortable for the crew who spend their working day there, and resilient in a way that carpet simply cannot be in a high-traffic zone. The same logic applies to the lavatory, for reasons that don’t require much imagination.
Even equipment choices that seem purely functional carry hidden implications. A certified aviation microwave costs upwards of $60,000, and the magnetron tends to fail every two to three years at roughly half the unit’s original cost. That’s a significant ongoing investment in an appliance that, if we’re honest, produces mediocre food. Ask ten people what actually tastes good reheated in a microwave and you’ll get a short list: soup, and popcorn. A convection oven or a steam oven produces genuinely enjoyable meals, takes the same space, and depending on configuration can cost less over the aircraft’s service life. The question that matters isn’t which appliance fits the cutout. It’s how the owner actually wants to eat at altitude.
None of these examples are glamorous. They won’t feature in design portfolios or award submissions. But they are the substance of what it feels like to live and work in a cabin over years of service, and each one is decided, or overlooked, long before anyone selects a fabric swatch.
This is where breadth of perspective becomes genuinely valuable. Cabin specifications have historically been shaped by a relatively narrow set of experiences from engineers whose technical expertise is deep and necessary – but whose daily routines and assumptions about comfort don’t represent every person who will use the aircraft. A specification informed by a wider range of perspectives – people with different morning routines, physical needs and different ideas about what comfort means, will catch things that a homogeneous group might miss. The hot water heater is a useful example: the engineer who specified a tank unit may simply not have had a morning routine that required more than sixty seconds of warm running water. A different voice at the table might have asked a question that prevented the problem entirely.
The hospitality industry learned that the distance between a room that looks wonderful and a room that feels wonderful is filled by hundreds of small, deliberate decisions about how people actually use the space. Aircraft cabins are no different, except the asset cost and the difficulty of making post-delivery changes amplify every oversight. Retrofitting a flow-through water heater after delivery means replacing not just the unit but running larger electrical cables back to the distribution panels: a job that costs many times what it would have taken to specify correctly from the start, and one that means the aircraft is grounded while it happens. Post-delivery downtime, for a decision that could have been made on paper months earlier.
Perhaps the language itself is part of the problem. ‘Cabin Design’ naturally centres the visual – the aesthetic as art form. The best completion managers and designers already think well beyond this, weaving engineering, certification, daily usability, and long-term maintenance into their process as a matter of course. But the industry doesn’t yet have widely adopted language for the discipline that connects all of these considerations: the holistic concern with how a cabin performs as a living and working environment, not just how it looks on delivery day.
Hotels found that naming this discipline helped them invest in it properly. Today, ‘guest experience design’ is a recognised and desirable role within hospitality – aviation might benefit from a similar approach. Regardless, ‘good design’ should never be limited to the aesthetics because a beautiful cabin that frustrates its owner on every flight is not, in any meaningful sense, well designed.