The Boeing 787 Dreamliner wowed travellers when it entered service with its electrochromic windows — no plastic shade, just a button that darkens or lightens the glass on demand. Two decades on, though, that clever bit of tech has become a maintenance nightmare, and American Airlines has reportedly had enough. The carrier is said to be replacing the dimming windows on its older 787s with conventional ones, as part of a broader nose-to-tail refresh of the aircraft.
The issue is not that the windows fail on their own. It is passenger confusion. Many flyers treat the dimming control like a shade, sliding it one way expecting it to darken the glass, then the other way to restore the view — and the window gets stuck in a fully dimmed or fully clear state, or the mechanism simply breaks. Airlines have logged countless faults from this misunderstanding, and repairs are neither cheap nor quick. Crews also lack a meaningful override, so a window stuck dark means a passenger loses the view for the whole flight, something Dreamliner fans routinely complain about.
American's reported fix is pragmatic rather than futuristic: swap the smart glass for regular windows with physical shades on the older aircraft in the fleet, while newer 787 deliveries presumably keep the dimming feature. The airline's Dreamliner cabins are getting other upgrades at the same time, so travellers flying an older 787 in the coming years may notice a mix of old and new inside the cabin.
Why should a holidaymaker care? If you love a window seat — and on the 787, with its bigger windows and lower cabin altitude, plenty of people do — it is worth knowing which style you will get. On an American 787 that has been retrofitted, the tactile certainty of a pull-down shade replaces the sometimes temperamental button. Frequent flyers split into two camps: those who found the self-dimming windows a gimmick that never worked as intended, and those who enjoyed being able to fine-tune glare without a flight attendant asking them to raise the shade during landing. Either way, this is a rare case of an airline rolling back a headline innovation because real-world usage did not match the brochure.
It also signals something wider. The 787's dimming windows were one of its most talked-about features when the aircraft launched, and if a major operator is quietly removing them, other airlines may watch how the retrofit goes before ordering their next batch of Dreamliners. Boeing has refined the technology over the years, but passenger habits are harder to redesign than a window.
For now, check the aircraft type and, if you care about the view, book a window and hope for glass you can actually see through — whichever control style it turns out to have.
