Background

Electric aviation is not simply conventional flying with a different fuel source. The operational characteristics of electric aircraft — shorter range, smaller passenger capacity, and significantly longer ground turnarounds due to charging or battery swapping — create a fundamentally different product from the jet flights passengers are used to. The booking experience, the airport journey, the wait on the ground, and the flight itself all need to be rethought for a context where a 45-minute charge stop is not a failure but a designed part of the service. Passengers arriving at a regional electric flight with jet-era expectations will be disappointed; passengers arriving with accurate expectations and a well-designed experience around the constraints may find something they actively prefer. Getting the experience design right is not a cosmetic concern — it is a core condition for regional electric aviation achieving mainstream adoption.

Problem

Key questions to be answered in the project:

1. How do different passenger personas — leisure travellers, business commuters, connecting passengers — experience and evaluate the trade-offs specific to regional electric flight, particularly around ground dwell time?
2. What do passengers actually do, need, and feel during an extended ground turnaround, and how does this differ between a charging scenario and a battery-swap scenario?
3. Which touchpoints in the end-to-end journey — booking, pre-departure communication, airport arrival, boarding, ground wait, in-flight, arrival — carry the greatest experience risk and the greatest design opportunity?
4. How should the booking and pre-departure flow set accurate expectations without making the product sound unattractive compared to conventional alternatives?
5. What physical and digital infrastructure at small regional airports would most improve the ground dwell experience, given the constraints of limited terminal space and lower passenger volumes?

In this project we aim to...

• Produce a service blueprint covering the end-to-end regional electric flight passenger journey for at least three distinct passenger personas, with explicit side-by-side comparison of the charging-wait and battery-swap-wait scenarios.
• Prototype the booking and at-airport experience flows, with particular attention to expectation-setting and the design of the ground dwell period.
• Identify the infrastructure and service design requirements that small regional airports would need to meet in order to deliver the proposed experience.