Panasonic Avionics is moving forward with its testing of the Eutelsat OneWeb LEO constellation. The company’s newest test aircraft broke cover late last week, carrying the Sidewinder 9×9 ESA from Gilat (formerly Stellar Blu) and a paint job highlighting the connectivity kit on board.
You don’t want to be testing the system on a customer’s airplane. You want to be testing it on your own flying test lab. So that’s what this aircraft is is there to do is give us the capability of testing the full system. – John Wade, Panasonic Avionics Vice President, Connectivity Business Unit
Panasonic chose the N768JS, a Citation Encore+ for its testing. And with the test aircraft now available, the company is wasting little time in pushing the qualification program forward. The plane logged at least a dozen flights from its based in Fargo, ND in its first week, racking up hours and gathering data to help PAC optimize its upcoming multi-orbit offering. And initial results are, per PAC’s John Wade, overwhelmingly positive.
“Everything we’ve seen over the first couple of days of testing is that the network is performing as expected,” he shared with PaxEx.Aero. “We’ve seen very high throughput, very low latency, which is I think what we’re going to all come to expect from IFC in the future. So everything we’re seeing so far in flight is mirroring what we’ve seen on the ground in that the OneWeb network is more than fit for purpose.
Wade expects the test and demo program to continue for the foreseeable future, noting the company intends to have the Citation available “for an indeterminate period of time.”
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