Klaus, you brought science to something that maybe had been seen as an “art” before. Is that fair to say?

I think that’s true. The origins go back to the 767 vs. A310 days.

I remember that well.

We were making these claims that the 767 is clearly superior because it has more window and aisle seats. Well, that makes intuitive sense. But as it happened I was going through some of our surveys and I said, “Wait a minute we’ve got all the data we need to model this.” And we’ve been able to design airplanes using the resulting models.

Klaus - in earlier days - on the go in Beijing.

I thought of you because I was reading this book called The Last Templar. There was a line in it that went something like, “I got on the airplane, I could hear the door close, and how relieved I was because there was an empty seat next to me!”

Yeah, it’s still the biggest discriminator in passenger satisfaction. And you know what the revelation for me was? It’s not just that people like having empty seats next to them. It’s that row arrangements dramatically influence the probability of having an empty seat next to you. Now, the response of the traditionalists to this discovery was, “Boeing thinks comfort is a matter of luck.”

My point is, no, I want to make you lucky. And frankly by converting from 2-5-2 to 3-3-3 we made people lucky. As a result of the change to 3-3-3, millions more passengers have been seated next to an empty seat than would have in exactly the same load factor circumstances in a traditional arrangement.

Airbus embraced the traditional view, and its 2-4-2 arrangement is one of the worst in terms of seating passengers next to empty seats.

A view of the “lucky” Boeing 3-3-3 cross section in the 787 Dreamliner.

And you know what’s interesting, too, is that with the A350, Airbus has changed their design philosophy. They started to talk about width at seated eye level, and perception of interior space.

You look at the A350 cross section. Frankly, it’s one of the ones that we considered for the 787. As I read the tea leaves looking at what they’ve done, they’ve basically gone far enough to get a kind of “inclusive-tour,” a very tight tourist configuration into the airplane at 10-abreast.

But we decided we shouldn’t go for that particular cross section for the 787 because it imposed significant added weight and drag on the airplane and as a result, higher fuel consumption, all that bad stuff. The inclusive-tour market was shrinking and people were growing. So we decided not to penalize the 98% of customers who wanted what we’ve offered, with a cross section optimized for the other 2%.

And I don’t think they’re getting any value with that cross section. I remember the conversation was, we were kind of plus or minus 3 inches. And of course they’re what, six inches wider?

We had the mathematical models in place to really analyze it. It was the first time we’d had that capability in the development of a cross section. And I still feel really good about what we chose instead.

What do you think about the 737 Boeing Sky Interior?

It’s my last new interior. It’s outstanding, really incredible. You know it’s funny, I think I’ve developed an eye for interiors and architecture and one of the things I’ve learned, one of the things I know about myself now, is I can’t tell from drawings. I can’t tell from a photograph.

The 737 Boeing Sky Interior.

It’s interesting because we’ve used photographs with some of our executives and sometimes you’ll get, “I can’t see a difference.”

It’s true. You often can’t “get it” just from a photograph. It’s also true that you can be easily fooled by a photograph. I’ve worked with some of the best industrial designers on the planet and there’s always a point where they say, “We’ve got to mock it up.” So we’ve developed this capability to do very rapid mockups.

There were two really telling examples of this recently. When we did the 747-8 passenger interior, there was much I could extrapolate from the 787. But the door 2 area, I knew I couldn’t tell if there was enough loft in the ceiling - from just the drawings. Because when we see something in real 3-D our eyes and brains are amazing at “decomposing” it and re-assembling it in the brain to make it all proportional. Our eyes and brains simply can’t do that with a 2-D image.

747-8 Intercontinental: Seeing the door 2 mockup was a revelation.

I’ll never forget when I first saw the loft of the door 2 ceiling for the 747-8. I knew what day the guys would be installing the ceiling panels over the door 2 area of the mockup, and I went over after they’d shut down for the night. Most of the lights were off. There were just a few safety lights on, like “ghost” lights in a theater. The front end of the mockup wasn’t built yet so just I walked into the gaping end of the mockup and back to door 2.

There was no one there to see the big smile that came to my face. It was gorgeous. The ghost lights were all I needed to see that the designers from Teague had nailed it.

Made a couple of tweaks, but it’s spectacular.

And the 737, it’s the same way. I went into the half-finished mockup and could see how beautifully the Boeing Sky Interior works in the 737. Frankly, it really exceeded my expectations, which were pretty high to begin with.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on, which have you enjoyed the most? I know that’s a hard question. And this is not, “This is Your Life, Klaus Brauer!”

Wow. Can I do two?

Yes, there are no rules. This is blogging!

I’ve had the “nerd’s joy” of discovering some insights into making passengers more comfortable and airlines more profitable. And I had the great joy of working with and taking inspiration from many brilliant and dedicated people within Boeing and our partner, Teague.

I think there’s no question that the whole 787 creative process was extraordinary. From the kinds of research that I’d never been involved in before, all of Blake Emery’s psychological research, a discipline I’d had no familiarity with, to really being deeply involved with industrial design. Again, a discipline which is not something I was trained in.

So you actually got a chance to look at the back end, and the front end of the process?

And it was great because I’d been out in the front end for so long listening to customers and trying to understand their requirements. You’ve got everything they’ve been telling you for years and an understanding of their problems. But then we enhanced it with insights from the flying public.

Klaus (l) and colleague Blake Emery in the Dreamliner mockup in Renton.

You know, our airline customers, God love ‘em, they’re in a tough, rapidly evolving business. To survive, the bulk of their focus must be on the short and medium term. They can’t afford to spend too much of their energies looking out 20 years. And I think it’s our job to look out that far. We owe it to our customers to keep an eye out that far in the future. And so the kinds of methodologies we were using, you shouldn’t expect an airline to do that for us, that’s our job.

And I think we did an extraordinary job with the research. And the team itself was just so broad, between the interior industrial designers at Teague and our own interior engineers at our concept center.

It took a lot of guts. It took a helluva salesmanship job to get Boeing to spend money that way.

And it’s a continuing process. And it’s delivering for Boeing. You develop things and hand them off and they’re matured somewhere else. It’s easy to say, “Yeah, that’s a product of the 787 program, or that’s a product of the 777 program,” when these things actually all had their genesis in the Boeing Concept Center. So all that, for anyone’s career, is a super highlight.

The second highlight is, being still a nerd at heart, I’m really happy with the revenue model that I developed, which we call “Whitefish.” The team wanted a fun name for it. Whitefish is ..

It’s a nice town near Kalispell, Montana near where I grew up.

Ha-ha. Well the true story is, yes, I came up with this during a family ski vacation in Whitefish, Montana. I had wanted to do a model that quantified the change in revenue that’s caused by a change in the passenger product.

The change could be, you increase the legroom, you decrease the legroom, you make the seats wider, you make them narrower, or maybe you change the class mix, have a few more business class seats and correspondingly fewer economy class seats. Any of those sorts of things.

Speaking of cabin altitude: Klaus and family at Mt. Rainier.

We can even factor in some things that we were seeing from research for the 787. For instance, some passengers get screaming headaches from cabin altitude. How can we reduce that and what’s the impact of that? So I came up with an analytical model that represents a passenger decision process to the point where you get changes in demand. It represents the different fare buckets, as we call them. It replicates the configuration of an airplane and emulates the airline’s revenue management system, and everything gets pulled in.

So I worked all this on my laptop watching the snow come down from a cabin in Whitefish. It works very well and it has proven far more adaptable than I’d imagined in those snowy days in Montana. As far as I know, no one had ever done this, to the same extent, from product change to revenue change. And Boeing uses it now in talking with customers, and in product development efforts.

I even use it when I’m talking about 747-8. I can look at two markets with similar airplane configurations and different demand and say, “Hey, you can make more money than an A380 can.”

What’s been fun is, I’m a real believer that things need to be transparent. Whitefish allows you to look at every equation and track the numbers right through. When you get a surprise, good or bad, you can see what’s happening in the model, and ask yourself if you believe it.

The surprises almost always come because so many things were interacting that your intuition just couldn’t keep track of them all. When you can walk through the interactions in the equations you usually end up saying, “Oh, that does make sense.”