Gadgetory

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 co-working 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 this is Transpo's it's a modular cabin project that Airbus has been developing inside at Silicon Valley labs called eight cubes the engineers in 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 mines that Airbus think that you could replace that cargo with an experienced 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 Transpo's executives who previously worked on Motorola's modular phone project gave me a tour of the plane so we are boarding through the door for area and we're gonna enter the plane from the rear so this first experience that we're entering is a sleeping area unlike business class right now it 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 it is traveling in groups of friends or sports teams or just with families with young kids this is a place where families can you know really spend some good time together these seats actually flip down and creates this large open space for four 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 takeoff and landing just grab this put look at that and you can sit down and buckle in [Laughter] you can imagine that you know you can grab a cup of coffee from our 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 our place 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 airline's 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 freely around the plane we want to make flying feel more human so you know this could be your office or a co-working space the restaurant could be in any nice restaurant and so 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 you're just loosening it 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 air Castor's 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 lab the Transpo's team claims it can swap out an entirely new module and well under an hour right now aircraft take about 30 days to do a change of a cabin we're trying to take that customization period from 30 days to about 30 minutes so 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 is which is what connects our current seat to the aircraft we're using those same exact connection points we're using the same exact processes that cargo aircraft use for loading on board an aircraft and so we're trying to we use a lot of dis existing work and only change the things that we want to change like the experiences in a way that the cabin is architected that doesn't mean the Transpo's 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 force structure even though it's a really small floor structure about two inches you have to handle that two inches sloped down to the actual door trying to solve something to where you're not taking up any existing cabin interior space is something that we're kind of 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 allowed to wander around well 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 that if you don't tell people what's on board an airplane everyone kind of knows what the learn behavior is he going and you sit in your seat what we found was that slowly people started getting up and kind of going to the to the bar or restaurant and and soon people got the idea that oh we don't have to stay in our seats there's actually reasons to get up and and move around it also showed us that yeah when you have a lot of passengers moving around it is a different experience but applying some simple traffic rule type ideas passengers can quickly figure out how to kind of navigate the cabin in a new way even if Airbus gets the modules perfectly engineers and it has come up at 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 sky is within the next couple of years absolutely so of course our number one priority of this project is safety we've had lots of good conversations with both FAA and NASA around how we could get this thing flying and we've gotten some really good feedback from them about how we can get this thing flying in 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 told me that the certification process can range from less than one year to more than five years it's depending on the applicants 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's 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 plenty of room okay what's the what's the weight equivalent of this fifteen hundred pounds yeah they feel like this is going off the edge alright now I think we're good awesome