Gulfstream
My Flight
A passenger-facing flight companion built into the Gulfstream My Cabin ecosystem — bringing real-time flight data, moving maps, destination weather, and world clocks to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
The journey, made beautiful
My Flight is the passenger-facing flight companion built into the Gulfstream My Cabin ecosystem for the G700. Where My Cabin gives passengers control over their physical environment, My Flight gives them command of their journey — surfacing real-time altitude, speed, distance, and ETA alongside a moving map, destination weather, world clocks, and a 3D globe, all from a single tab on iPhone and iPad.
My Flight replaced CabinView — a legacy Gulfstream flight information app that had been engineered rather than designed. CabinView was functional but clinical: dense data tables, small type, no map, and no light/dark adaptation. My Flight rebuilt the product from the ground up to feel less like avionics software and more like a travel companion.
Passengers who expect everything
Gulfstream's G700 passengers are experienced global travellers who regularly cross multiple time zones in a single journey — C-suite executives, heads of state, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals accustomed to having information when and how they want it.
"Passengers shouldn't have to ask. The aircraft should simply tell them."
From CabinView to My Flight
My Flight replaced CabinView — the legacy Gulfstream flight information app that had shipped on the G500, G600, and G650. CabinView surfaced basic flight data but was built with an engineering-first approach: dense tables of values, small type, no map visualisation, and no consideration for light or dark environments.
Branding Renamed
The Digital Experience team and Gulfstream Brand Marketing formally renamed the CabinView product line to My Flight — aligning it with the My Cabin ecosystem naming convention and signalling a clean break from the legacy product's visual and interaction language.
Maps Rebuilt
With the 3.0 release, entirely new 2D and 3D maps replaced the previous static imagery. The 2D map uses live satellite tile data with an animated aircraft position indicator. The 3D globe delivers a cinematic Earth view with physical terrain, ocean depth gradients, and real-time positioning.
Information Redesigned
The graphical refresh aligned My Flight with the My Cabin design language — the same type scale, color tokens, tile components, and motion system. Every metric was reconsidered: what to surface, at what size, in what order, and how it changes as the flight progresses.
Light & Dark Mode Designed
The Digital Experience team introduced light and dark modes that adapt automatically to the cabin's ambient conditions — synced to the lighting presets defined in My Cabin.
Understanding the journey before designing it
Before a single pixel was placed, the team ran a structured discovery phase — beginning with deep empathy work to understand what passengers and crew actually needed from an in-flight information product.
Squawk List Analysis
The team combed the G500, G600, and G650 squawk lists. CabinView's legibility, map absence, and data organisation appeared as recurring pain points across multiple aircraft operators.
Customer Delivery Executive Interviews
CDEs act as long-term relationship managers for Gulfstream's highest-value customers. Their qualitative accounts gave us unarticulated needs around polish, speed, and information hierarchy.
Flight Attendant Interviews
Both internal Gulfstream flight attendants and externally employed crew were interviewed. They are the primary proxy for passenger feedback mid-flight.
Sales Executive Interviews
Gulfstream's sales executives frequently demo CabinView during delivery events. Their accounts of which features generated the most passenger interest provided a competitive-grade lens.
Competitive Research
Benchmarked against FlightPath 3D, Collins Aerospace Airshow 2, Honeywell Ovation, and Google Earth. The gap between consumer-grade and aviation-grade interfaces presented a clear design opportunity.
Prioritisation Matrix
Features were plotted on a two-axis matrix: difficulty to implement versus usefulness. This informed the MVP scope: 2D Maps, 3D Maps, World Clocks, Destination Weather, Global Navigation, Settings, and Help.
User personas
"If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers."
"I want to make the most of the time I have, whether that's with family or pushing the business forward."
"The information has to be right there when I need it — I can't be hunting for it between courses."
"My job is making sure everything runs before the passengers even notice there was something to run."
Data that reads as beauty, not complexity
The central challenge of My Flight was to surface what passengers actually care about — how long until we land, what's the weather in Tokyo, which time zone am I in — while making that data feel calm, considered, and unmistakably premium.
Live data without visual disruption
Flight data had to update continuously without causing jarring number jumps, loading states, or stale displays. Polling intervals and animated counter transitions required careful co-ordination with the aircraft's data bus.
Tile hierarchy that works for everyone
Different passengers prioritise different metrics. The tile system needed a clear, research-backed default hierarchy while supporting personalisation without exposing settings complexity.
Map scale across zoom levels
Both 2D satellite and 3D globe views had to balance global route context with local terrain detail — responding intelligently to pinch-zoom without becoming disorienting.
Coherent light and dark experiences
Light and dark modes had to be genuinely co-designed, not one-way inversions. Every contrast ratio, type weight, icon stroke, and shadow depth needed individual evaluation for each surface.
Aircraft data bus latency
The G700's data bus delivers updates at variable intervals. The UI needed to gracefully handle brief data gaps during climbs, turns, and descent — without alarming passengers with blank tiles.
No persistent internet connection
Aircraft connectivity is subject to geographic blackout zones. My Flight had to function fully from onboard data, with internet-dependent features degrading gracefully when connectivity was unavailable.
Lead Product Designer & Product Manager
I led the end-to-end design of My Flight across the full product lifecycle — from the initial discovery sprint through to App Store submission. In addition to owning all design work, I served as the de facto product manager for the My Flight tab.
Discovery & Research
Led passenger interviews and a competitive audit spanning commercial IFE and private aviation apps. Synthesised squawk list data, CDE qualitative feedback, and competitive findings into a clear problem definition and feature brief.
Information Architecture
Defined the My Flight tab structure — Flight Info as the default view, with Moving Maps, Destination Weather, and World Clocks accessible via sub-navigation.
Visual Design
Designed both light and dark mode treatments simultaneously, ensuring each felt intentional rather than derived. Established the tile system including animation easing, counter transition behaviour, and the progress arc components.
Prototyping
Built high-fidelity interactive prototypes in Principle for CAB sessions, simulating live data updates, map transitions, and mode switching.
CAB Facilitation
Facilitated three rounds of Customer Advisory Board sessions for My Flight — presenting prototypes, collecting structured feedback, and translating findings into actionable design decisions.
Design System & Handoff
Delivered a complete Figma component library with Auto Layout, tokens, and annotated redlines to the iOS development team.
The journey, made visible
My Flight lives within the My Cabin application as a dedicated tab — the one place passengers go to understand where they are, where they're going, and what's waiting for them when they land.
Flight Info — Dark Mode
Real-time statistics in a high-contrast dark layout across iPad and iPhone. Altitude, speed, ETA, and heading sit in a customisable tile dashboard.
Flight Info — Light Mode
The same tile dashboard in a warm paper-white treatment for bright cabin conditions. Independently tuned for legibility — not inverted from dark.
Destination Weather
Live conditions at the destination airport plus a 3-day forecast on both iPad and iPhone.
World Clocks
Configurable analogue and digital clocks for origin, destination, and additional time zones, shown in landscape on iPhone.
2D Moving Map
A live Google Maps satellite tile layer locked to the aircraft's real-time position. Passengers can pan and pinch-zoom freely.
3D Globe
A FlightPath 3D globe centred on the aircraft's live position, rendered with physical terrain, ocean depths, and landmass outlines.
Every screen, considered
My Flight comprises four primary views: Flight Info, Moving Maps (2D satellite and 3D globe), Destination Weather, and World Clocks.
The default view when passengers open My Flight. Up to eight data tiles are arranged in a 2×4 grid on iPhone and a wider 3×3 grid on iPad. Tile order is user-configurable via a long-press drag interface, with changes persisted to iCloud so preferences carry across devices.
The live data connection establishes automatically when the aircraft is airborne. During ground operations, the dashboard shows planned departure time and destination — giving passengers useful information even before the flight begins.
Ground Speed
Displayed in mph by default, switchable to knots in Settings. Updated every 5 seconds via the data bus.
Altitude
An animated counter easing prevents jarring number jumps during rapid climb and descent phases.
Flying Time & ETA
Elapsed flight time from wheels-up and remaining time to destination. ETA shown in local destination time and UTC.
Airspeed
True airspeed from the aircraft's avionics system, alongside ground speed to give passengers a sense of headwind and tailwind conditions.
Distance to Destination
Remaining distance in nautical miles and kilometres. A circular progress arc shows the proportion of route completed.
Currently Over / Heading
Current geographic location and aircraft heading in degrees with cardinal direction, including a miniature animated compass rose.
Outside Temperature
Ambient temperature at cruising altitude — typically around −57°C / −70°F at 43,000 ft. Consistently surprising and delightful in CAB sessions.
Weather at Destination
A summary tile showing current conditions at the destination airport, with a tap drilling into the full Destination Weather view.
Destination Weather
Weather was the second most-requested feature during discovery interviews. My Flight presents a clean, scannable forecast with current conditions, today's high and low, precipitation probability, wind speed, and a three-day outlook.
World Clocks
World Clocks presents up to four analogue faces in landscape on iPhone — each showing date, time, and a night-mode indicator for locations currently in darkness. Toggle between analogue and digital, and between 12 and 24-hour formats.
Placing the aircraft in the world
The 2D and 3D moving maps are the most visually complex features in My Flight — and the ones passengers interact with most for extended periods.
"The gap between consumer map products and aviation moving-map systems was stark — and presented a clear opportunity to design something genuinely delightful."
2D Satellite Map
Built on Google Maps with a customised layer configuration. The aircraft's live position is marked by an animated heading indicator. The route arc is rendered from origin to destination — the completed portion in white, the remaining leg in brand teal.
Map Controls
Layer toggle, location search, re-centre button, and zoom controls sit in fixed corner positions. A persistent status bar shows time to destination, flying time, and total flight time.
3D Mode Toggle
A single tap switches between 2D and 3D views, animating through a brief camera-pull-back moment that contextualises the position change.
Route Layers
Passengers toggle between Road Map, Satellite, and Terrain base layers. The route arc and aircraft marker persist across all layers with automatic color adjustment.
3D Globe
Powered by FlightPath 3D — Gulfstream's aviation software partner — the 3D globe renders a physically accurate Earth with terrain elevation, ocean depth gradients, atmospheric haze, and real-time day/night terminator rendering.
"At 43,000 feet over the Atlantic, the 3D globe makes passengers feel connected to the world below, not isolated from it."
Research at altitude
My Flight was validated through structured passenger and crew interviews; prototype testing with CAB members using high-fidelity Principle prototypes; and observational research with actual G700 passengers and crew during acceptance flights.
"I would just love to see it on a bigger screen. The 3D globe — I could stare at that for hours."
— Flight attendant participant, CAB August session · Prototype round 2Key findings
ETA over altitude
Passengers overwhelmingly prioritised time-to-destination over altitude or raw airspeed. ETA became the most prominent tile in the default dashboard configuration.
Maps for orientation, not navigation
Participants used maps to feel oriented relative to the world below — not to track the route in detail. This shifted the 3D globe from a secondary feature to a primary one.
Weather as arrival planning
Destination weather was used as a planning tool — passengers wanted to know what to expect before landing.
Clocks for time zone management
World Clocks was used most heavily by crew, not passengers. Flight attendants tracked multiple time zones to co-ordinate rest rotations and service timing.
Shared foundations
My Flight shares the My Cabin design system — the same type scale, color tokens, spacing system, iconography, and motion principles that govern the broader passenger experience application.
Color tokens
Typography system
Plus Jakarta Sans 800 — Display
Used for all section headings, feature names, and the My Flight title. The 800 weight with tight letter-spacing reads powerfully at large sizes.
DM Sans 300–500 — Body & UI
Used for paragraph copy, tile labels, navigation items, and all secondary text. The 300 weight provides elegant lightness in body copy.
JetBrains Mono — Data Values
Used exclusively for numeric data values: altitude, airspeed, ETA countdowns, temperatures, and distances. Monospaced character width prevents layout shift as live values update.
Device specifications
iPhone (Passenger)
15px margin · 50px column · 9px gutter
Portrait primary · landscape for Clocks
iOS 12+ · auto-updates during flight
iPad (Passenger)
22px margin · 60px column · 24px gutter
Landscape primary · portrait supported
iPadOS 12+ · tile grid 3×3