The Business of Passenger Experience
Spirit Airlines will add inflight wifi as it seeks to improve the onboard passenger experience. The carrier's full fleet will carry Thales FlytLIVE hardware by the end of Summer 2019.
Sticky 2Ku antennae will cost Gogo north of $25mm to repair or replace, and that's not the only challenge new CEO Oak Thorne faced as he presented his first quarterly earnings call for the inflight connectivity provider.
A spike in aviation-related revenue is good news for Inmarsat but not all revenue is created equally. There's more to this story than just the raw numbers.
A decade of bribery and illicit payments came to an abrupt end a couple years ago. Now Panasonic Avionics is looking to move on. The company settled its case with the US Department of Justice and SEC, paying massive fines but avoiding further issues.
Commercial success in the inflight connectivity business is anything but easy. That isn't stopping newcomers from trying. Saudi Arabia's Taqnia Space group launched the UON offering earlier this month and it has potential. But like other offerings in the market there are questions about how well it can scale up to meet demand (both bandwidth and profits).
Major drama in the inflght connectivity world this afternoon as joint venture partners Eutelsat and Viasat are splitting on a major project. Eutelsat is launching KONNECT, its own massive increase in Ka-band capacity in 2021 and has new partners to work with on that deal. Oh, and it is bailing on its potential partnership for the ViaSat-3's EMEA coverage.
There's arguably no better way to assuage investors after roporting significant losses for 2017 than to report multiple new orders to start 2018. For Global Eagle the balance is a tough one, but the 300+ new planes added to the connectivity backlog is a nice bit of news for incoming CEO Josh Marks to announce.
How much revenue does the American Airlines fleet contribute to Gogo? What will things look like in 2018 as 400ish planes leave? Here's a look at what I think might happen.
What good is having an inflight wifi connectivity product if no one is using it? Gogo sits flush with satellite capacity and is pushing to increase take rates (and revenue) up dramatically on its platform.
Aeromexico's first 737 MAX rolled off the assembly line at Renton last week and all indications are that, unlike the company's 737-800s, it will not be flying with the Gogo 2Ku solution.
