Delta Picks Amazon Leo for Next-gen Inflight Internet

Delta Air Lines will activate (at least) 500 aircraft on the Amazon Leo inflight internet service from 2028. The deal will bring low-latency, high-bandwidth capacity to the fleet, boosting performance for passengers and crew alike.

This agreement gives us the fastest and most cost-effective technology available to better connect the world today, and it deepens our work with a global leader that shares our ambition to build what’s next — creating even stronger human connection for our people and our customers for years to come. – Ed Bastian, CEO, Delta Air Lines

---

---

The updated inflight internet solution will not only boost performance for passengers on their personal devices, but also further enable the connecting inflight entertainment experience via the Delta Sync platform. Airlines and IFE providers have been pushing hard in recent months to better integrate those systems, with the resulting experience allowing for more personalized and timely content on in-seat screens.

Delta notes the Amazon equipage comes “Along with existing world-class partnerships with Viasat and Hughes,” implying that those vendors will remain in play at the carrier. And timing of the full 500-aircraft fitting is unclear. If it is a slow roll from 2028 it could be just new aircraft, not displacing existing installs from Viasat and Hughes Networks. Or those installs could be scrapped in some cases. Delta has never been shy about swapping hardware on the planes to improve its inflight internet offering.

---

---

The carrier also shares that the multi-provider approach brings “every SkyMiles Member multi-device, low-latency high-speed Wi-Fi from gate to gate.” Viasat does not offer the low-latency option today, but it plans to in a few years when the Telesat Lightspeed LEO constellation comes online. Similarly, the Hughes implementation for Delta calls for multi-orbit, multi-link connectivity via the “Fusion” terminal concept. It blends Eutelsat Oneweb LEO services via an electronically steered antenna with multi-orbit options of the Hughes Jupiter network connected via ThinKom‘s ThinAir Ka2517.

This is the second customer secured by Amazon Leo (nee Kuiper), and a massive boost to the commitment backlog. JetBlue announced a similar deal last year with a subset of its fleet committed to the new LEO constellation. The slightly later timing on Delta’s announcement likely reflects a more reasonable expectation of when the network will be ready for airline customer connections.