Comfort is becoming an important issue that airlines use to differentiate themselves in a competitive market. Activity and posture, as an integrating external manifestation when passengers interact with the complex cabin system, could be used as an effective way to study passenger comfort. This study aims to analyze the passengers’ comfort perception based on activity and posture analysis performed by passengers on the flight. By recording and reconstructing the activities performed by passengers in a 2‐hour simulated flight, the typical activities and the corresponding postures were identified through the video analysis software system MVTA. The passengers remained the greater part of the time performing the activity of sleeping and resting (34.3%), followed by using small electrical devices (32.7%) and reading (16.1%). The main postures in these activities were encoded and displayed in the elliptic structural diagram based on the variations in head, back, arms, and legs. The difficulties and constraints resulted from the seat and cabin were summarized by a questionnaire. Based on the analysis results, the suggestions about seat design, activity guidance, and arrangement were offered from the perspective of supportability, adjustability, affordance, and aesthetics, which would be applied in improving the passengers’ comfort and innovations in cabin and seat.

Comfort is becoming one of the most important principles in the process of design and evaluation of civil aircraft cabins. However, the comprehensive quantitative evaluation of comfort in an aircraft cabin is a complicated issue because of the subjectivity of comfort perception and a large number of factors involved in the whole complex cabin system. A hybrid model combined with the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is proposed, which considers both the interrelation between the criteria and the fuzziness of subjective comfort perception concurrently. The result of the empirical study from the questionnaire survey in flight was consistent with that of the hybrid model. The proposed model is effective. It could provide a more reasonable priority to improve comfort in the aircraft cabin. According to the measured results of the cabin environment, the cabin facilities and layout, seats and service, the specific differences between the criteria can be displayed clearly, which is helpful to improve the cabin comfort level.

Comfort is becoming one of the most important principles in the process of design and evaluation of civil aircraft cabin. However, the comprehensive quantitative evaluation of comfort in an aircraft cabin is a complicated issue, because of the subjectivity of comfort perception and a large amount of factors involved in the whole complex cabin system. A hybrid model combined with Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is proposed, which considers both the interrelation between the criteria and the fuzziness of subjective comfort perception concurrently. The result of empirical study from questionnaire survey in flight was consistent with that of the hybrid model. The proposed model is effective. It could provide a more reasonable priority to improve comfort in the aircraft cabin. According to the measured results of cabin environment, cabin facilities and layout, seat and service, the specific differences between the criteria can be displayed clearly, which is helpful to improve the cabin comfort level.