Less than three years after the product first took flight, Gogo‘s business aviation division reached the 1,000 units installed milestone on its AVANCE L5 inflight wifi connectivity solution. More than 325,000 flights have operated with the system installed since Q4 2017 when the upgraded air-to-ground (ATG) wifi system became available.
Our team hit it out of the park with both the AVANCE L5 and L3 systems. And what’s so exciting to me is that we still have so much opportunity ahead of us.
– Sergio Aguirre, president of Gogo Business Aviation
The company also notes nearly 450 installations of the smaller, lighter AVANCE L3 model for smaller aircraft. All told the company says the system has logged more than 420,000 hours and 211 million miles, with users consuming 150 million megabytes of data. That breaks down to about 350 megabytes per hour of flight.
With nearly 1,500 AVANCE systems now flying the newer generation of hardware represents roughly 27% of the total ATG install base in the Business Aviation division for the company. The company notes that AVANCE systems are line-fit offerable from a number of aircraft OEMs and available on a retrofit basis with more than 200 supplemental type certificate (STC) approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The boost of installed systems comes against a rough market backdrop, where the business aviation community in the US reduced flights by nearly 80% in April. Accounts were suspended or canceled and installations slowed. But the BizAv market bounced back much more quickly than the commercial aviation segment. August had Gogo-connected private planes averaging approximately 80% of the levels they saw at the beginning of the year. Moreover, many of those canceled or suspended accounts came back at higher priced service levels. Gogo indicated that 940 customers suspended service completely and 60% of those re-activated by June. Of the ~600 planes active again about 80%, just shy of 500 planes, restored their subscription to the original or higher service levels.
For Q2 2020 the Business Aviation division saw revenue down only 23% YoY, with service revenue down only 20%. But the division maintained a robust segment profit margin of 50% on $27.2mm in profits for the quarter.
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