Flight Pro

Product Design

The problem with working in an agency and being under an NDA means that your portfolio starts to become pretty lacking. During 2018, I needed to come up with something substantial to put into my portfolio.

Around that time, I had recently taken my first intro flight for pilot lessons. I had been enamored with flying since I was a child and had played with Flight Simulator on an old Windows 95 computer. That introductory flight lesson at 28 in a Cessna 152 had me taking off, landing, maneuvering, and talking to air traffic control - in a real plane! Being in the cockpit for real made one thing immediately clear: general aviation aircraft were full of aging analog instrumentation, while touchscreens were just becoming genuinely capable in cars, and ADS-B Out was becoming a new FAA requirement at the same time.

The initial concept was a retrofit — a Tesla-style center console that could sit between pilot and co-pilot and replace a portion of the instrument panel, while leaving safety-critical analog dials in place. A mentor pushed further: it was just a case study, so why not explore the full version? That became the real project — a ground-up reimagining of a glass cockpit, where every design decision was driven not just by how something looked but by what it actually needed to do. Placement, size, and hierarchy all followed function.

Within that, several adjacent problems were worth solving: ATC radio is garbled and hard to parse in crowded airspace — voice-to-text addressed that. ADS-B out enabled real-time awareness of surrounding aircraft, not just on a flat map but in three dimensions, accounting for what was above and below. A landing assistance layer provided glide path guidance similar to what airports already use for large aircraft — extended to any pilot. Layers of map data, building on approaches Garmin had already introduced, were woven into the system. And for the most critical data — altitude, speed, distance to destination — a heads-up visor display kept it in the pilot's direct line of sight, borrowed from how large commercial airliners handle information hierarchy. The system was also designed to mirror and expand for a co-pilot seat, and to support dynamic camera access toggled on and off during flight. Select elements were taken into 3D modeling and I even explored integrating it into actual flight simulator software.

In the years since, this has continued to be a fan favorite: compliments during interviews, a Swiss drone manufacturer reaching out to use the interface for their flight controllers, and a philanthropist wanting to adapt it as an interactive aviation education tool for kids. But I still I want to fly it in my flight simulator, so if anyone wants to partner with me on that, hit me up.

Capabilities

Speculative & Concept Design
Aviation & Cockpit UX
Hardware-Software Interface Design
AR & HUD Design
Voice & Audio UX
Information Design
User Research (SME Interviews)
3D Modeling

Collaboration

Two friends pursuing general aviation licensesinterviewed as subject matter experts; used for prototyping feedback
Mentorpushed Alex past the retrofit constraint toward a full glass cockpit exploration

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Journey Map