KLM kicked offline by Intelsat 29e outage

When the Intelsat 29e satellite failed last month anchor tenant Panasonic Avionics indicated that it had mitigated the loss of capacity for all customers.

Intelsat has confirmed that their 29e satellite is no longer operational, and we have worked closely with them to fully migrate our operations to other satellites, leveraging the strengths of the Panasonic global communications network to ensure this is done seamlessly and with no loss of quality for our airline customers and their passengers.

This transition is now complete and we will conduct further alignments to enhance the passenger experience as we continue to install additional equipment in other teleports.

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The claim that airlines are not seeing a loss of quality appears to be in dispute. A report from the Netherlands suggests that KLM chose to deactivate the inflight wifi connectivity solution on its 787 fleet, the planes served by the Panasonic Avionics eXConnect solution. This decision was made based on the degraded quality of the service available to the airline.

KLM is not the only carrier that is working through the challenges associated with the loss of bandwidth. Other airlines have issued internal communications explaining the outage and the limitations to the system to their employees in hopes that the front line staff can defuse consumer frustrations.

KLM also operates a portion of its long-haul fleet with the Gogo 2Ku system on board. This is mostly installed on the A330s today as well as a few 777s. Those installations faced problems last summer due to excessive vibration caused by the antenna radome placement. A revised positioning of the system was approved earlier this year allowing installations to resume.

Neither KLM nor Panasonic Avionics have responded to inquiries about this service suspension.

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