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Case Study · 02Built-in Cabin DisplayBusiness Jet OEM · Name withheld · January 2026

Software that ships with the airframe: a built-in cabin display.

LRU-grade

Built for a line-replaceable display unit installed in the aircraft.

Boot-to-ready

Deterministic startup, rendering, and memory behavior on fixed embedded hardware.

Fleet-wide

Behavior that is consistent unit-to-unit, for the life of the installation.

The Challenge

Building for an LRU inverts most assumptions of modern app development.

Not every interface lives on a passenger's phone. For a business jet OEM, we built the application for a built-in cabin display, installed in the aircraft as a line-replaceable unit (LRU). This is software that ships with the airframe: it boots when the aircraft powers up, runs for the life of the installation, and gets no app-store updates to fall back on.

The hardware is fixed and resource-constrained; you don't get to assume next year's chipset. There is no “refresh the page”: the display must come up ready, every power cycle, and stay responsive for the full duration of every flight. On embedded aviation hardware, “it usually works” isn't a spec, it's a defect.

The Product

A display that is on when the aircraft is on.

A 4:1 panel in the cabin wall. Eight functions on a fixed grid, a quick-access row beneath them, and a welcome screen that greets passengers as the aircraft powers up. There is no gesture to learn and no state the unit has not been designed to be in.

Cabin display welcome screen: tiles for flight, audio, video, preferences, temperature, shades, lights and tank levels, with the words Welcome Aboard
Home screen, as it boots
  • The eight-tile function grid and quick-access rowFixed function gridEight tiles and a quick-access row, identical on every unit in the fleet. Crews are trained once, so the layout never moves.

Screens from the shipping application

What We Built

An interface engineered for the constraints of embedded aviation hardware.

  • The full display application

    The complete application for the built-in display unit, designed from the start around the constraints of embedded aviation hardware.

  • Preferences that live on the unit

    Wallpaper sets and settings are loaded onto the LRU and switched for the forward and aft displays independently. They survive every power cycle without a server to restore them from.

  • Predictable performance

    Controlled memory footprint, deterministic rendering, and fast boot-to-ready behavior on fixed, resource-constrained hardware.

  • Built for the LRU lifecycle

    Long service life, field replaceability, and behavior that stays consistent unit-to-unit across the fleet.

  • Aviation-grade discipline

    Exhaustive failure-mode analysis, defensive handling of every input and state, and testing built around how the hardware actually behaves, not how an emulator does.

The Outcome

A display that is simply part of the aircraft.

Software that passengers and crew never have to think about: it is on when the aircraft is on, it responds when touched, and it behaves identically on every airframe in the fleet.

A phone app can ask the user to try again. A display bolted into the aircraft cannot. Every state the unit can reach is a state we designed for.

Tell us what has to work. We'll tell you what it takes.

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