The Business of Passenger Experience
Air Canada's 737 MAX fleet is getting inflight connectivity but it might not be what was expected. The first radome installation is complete and it looks like a new vendor may be in play, with Thales breaking in to Gogo territory.
Passengers flying across the Pacific Ocean are set for a major upgrade in inflight connectivity performance. Panasonic Avionics and Eutelsat announced this week that Eutelsat 172b is now in service, delivering a massive increase in capacity to the market, particularly for the routes aircraft use between the United States and Asia.
Netflix wants you to have free wifi on your next flight. That’s the only way it figures you’ll use your Netflix service on board. The catch (of course there is one) is that Netflix doesn’t want to be the one paying for that bandwidth. And it doesn’t really care who is, so long as it gets credit for making your flight better.
Who is winning the race to provide wifi on international flights? Probably the consumers, with United Airlines following and Delta close behind. American is a distant 3rd among the major US carriers right now.
Minor (unsolicited) shenanigans and a very nice friend meant my recent flight from Narita to Newark was in the BusinessFirst cabin. Solid product, even while not the best in the market overall.
Might United Airlines be announcing an order for 10 new Boeing 777-300ERs in the near future? Seems quite likely. And it makes a lot of sense in many ways, assuming it can get dispatch reliability back up where it should be.
The United Airlines Wifi rollout is proceeding rapidly, with the full mainline fleet expected to be fitted in just a few months. But there is much more to come from the company once the kit is installed.
Is the end nigh for in-seat entertainment screens? Streaming media to passengers’ personal devices is growing rapidly. But Thales/LiveTV says the imminent death of the screen may be greatly exaggerated.
United Airlines has a different approach to in-flight wifi from the rest of the market. Each plane will be a “node on the network” not just have an augmented in-flight entertainment system.
More of the United Airlines international fleet has wifi now. The carrier has started deployment of Panasonic’s Ku-band satellite connectivity on their 2-cabin 777-200ERs. Hooray, internet!
