Do mockups sell aircraft? Guy is asked this directly. “Absolutely. Bombardier buyers will literally place orders based on a good mockup.” I believe 18 were sold at EBACE over the three-day show and the round the block Queue to privately view it remained even after the show had closed"
Howard Guy & Steve Varsano
Do Mockups Sell Aircraft?
Do mockups sell aircraft? Guy is asked this directly. “Absolutely. Bombardier buyers will literally place orders based on a good mockup.” I believe 18 were sold at EBACE over the three-day show and the round the block Queue to privately view it remained even after the show had closed
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The mockup itself became a kind of travelling sales office and it actually did not need an aviation event to show it off. Built in two halves on purpose-built European-standard trailers, self-contained with its own air conditioning for the full fuselage, it could go — and did go — almost anywhere. Monaco Yacht Show. Sardinia, parked next to a five-star hotel through the season, while Russian oligarchs stepped off superyachts and straight onto the Global 7500. Dubai. When the Sardinia-to-Dubai logistics ran tighter than planned, Bombardier simply chartered an Antonov AN-124 — one of the largest cargo aircraft ever built — and flew the mockup there. The mock up had its own life, mission and agenda which saw it travel the world over a 6 year period and everywhere it went, it sold aircraft…….lots of them!
“Incredible,” says Guy. It’s hard to argue.
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The warranty on our mockup, incidentally, was two years. The warranty on the actual aircraft is only one. To cover the disparity, Guy cleverly negotiated a deal whereby his team would travel with and service the mockup — “my guys were there, if anything went wrong they just fixed it” — for its entire world tour. He turned a handshake and a prototype into a two-year contract to fly around the globe.
The Three-Day Seat: How Car Thinking Saves Aviation Deadlines
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If the Bombardier story illustrates what Design Q does at its best, the Geneva seat crisis of the Global launch illustrates how they do it under pressure.
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Seven weeks from the show, Bombardier called. The seat supplier had pulled out of supplying prototype seats and provided just one frame. Could Design Q build the seats? Guy replied simply. Yes. They were given six weeks — for a task most aviation suppliers would consider a six-month minimum.
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The Design Q approach to seat manufacturing reflects the same automotive logic that runs through everything they do. Rather than hand-carving foam cushions — which produces one beautiful seat and eleven inconsistent ones — they machine everything. CAD model, machined substructure, machined foam to A-surface and B-surface specification, patterned trim. Once the master pattern is signed off, the covers are cut and sewn from it, identically, every time.
“These are car guys,” Guy explains. “They’re used to doing 50 seats in two days for a production line. Once you’ve got that master pattern, you just push the button and go.”
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With three weeks to go, Bombardier’s team came to sign off the first completed seat. Guy had already pre-marked it with red dots — every nit, every imperfection — to get the review out of the way faster. After working through the list, someone asked where the other eleven seats were.
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“There aren’t another eleven,” Guy said. “You sign this off. All the other eleven will just happen. In about three days.”
Bombardier didn’t believe him. The original seat supplier, who turned up to the show in Geneva, stood on the stand and stared. “He put his hand on his head and didn’t know what to say,” Guy recalls. “He didn’t know how we’d done it. He didn’t know the process.”
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Better still: Bombardier themselves couldn’t tell which of the two working prototype seats were Design Q’s builds and which one had come from the official supplier. Neither could anyone else.
Always Higher Than the Renders
There is a line Guy recites to every client, at the beginning of every project, and he’s said it enough times now that he means it with total confidence:
“I guarantee you the real thing will look better than the renderings you’re looking at.”
The renderings, he is at pains to note, are already very good. Design Q does not sketch vague impressions and call it a day. The studio produces the kind of photorealistic visualization and flythrough animation that wins pitches against Ferrari. But even so: when a physical mockup is complete, when you walk through a cabin and everything reflects and twinkles, and you smell the leather and feel the temperature and the quality of the stitching — it is always better than any screen can show.
“Yet, this commitment to exceeding expectations often comes with a cost.” Guy says candidly. “In the consultancy world, where a small team can move faster than a corporation and fifteen layers of sign-off approvals, the work naturally expands beyond the scope of our contract. Tweaks happen. Refinements accumulate. The project itself always get better. But billable time? That tends to go in the opposite direction. Especially when we are on a fixed contract which is the norm”
“This has got to be the best thing we’ve ever done,” he says — and it’s not a marketing line. It is, apparently, an actual internal constraint he applies to every project. The customer, as this interviewer observed, always winds up getting more than they paid for.
“In terms of the scope-creep, I do care of course,” Guy admits. “But I sort of don’t care. Because my mission, if not my own nature, is to pull out all the stops and make it the best thing we’ve ever done, every time.”
D Q D E S I G N & P R O T O T Y P E S
is a multi-disciplinary design group located in Coventry, West Midlands, England
For more information visit: https://www.designq.co.uk/
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