You might expect people speaking at the 2018 Global Connected Aircraft Summit to represent companies more invested in connectivity than any other. You might be surprised.<\/p>\n
While many passengers, especially Millennials, expect In-Flight Connectivity (IFC) on their flights, it can be difficult to make the business case that it\u2019s a worthy investment for airlines, according to Air China\u2019s<\/strong> North America VP Zhihang Chi. \u201cI\u2019ve had conversations with my chairman, my CEO, and the person I hate the most, my CFO \u2013 and I never win that ROI battle,\u201d he joked Tuesday at the GCA Summit in San Diego, California.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why, despite what Chi calls a personal \u201cillness\u201d he can only cure with connectivity, Air China has not embraced IFC. The airline began exploring options in 2013 but still hasn\u2019t taken the plunge. Chi said the lack of a proven path to profitability and the high cost of entry combined with the volatility \u2013 his airline doesn\u2019t want to invest in technology that is obsolete soon after \u2013 serves as a deterrent.<\/p>\n And if it\u2019s hard for Chi to make the value proposition, it\u2019s even harder for FedEx\u2019s<\/strong> Ross Armstrong.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough we have 25,000 passengers in the back, none of them have a need for connectivity, so it\u2019s a difficult business model to prove,\u201d Armstrong said, referring to the inability of cargo carriers to benefit by bundling cabin and cockpit connectivity without live passengers.<\/p>\n FedEx went paperless in 2011, and Armstrong said the company has not lost a flight due to Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) failure since \u2014 though there have been three major incidents where that might have happened if electronic redundancies hadn\u2019t prevented it. But the business case there is pretty obvious; those tablets pay for themselves in operational costs.<\/p>\n On the connectivity front, it\u2019s less clear, according to Chi.<\/p>\n \u201cSomeone will tell you they\u2019ve got it figured out and will make a buck from it. Others say it\u2019s an equalizer; \u2018someone else has it, so I have to have it.\u2019 Both are valid. Some have gone as far as to say it\u2019s a human right or need.\u201d In the end, Chi said, committing to connectivity would simply take leadership, but that it can be worth doing even if the business model might not immediately make quantifiable sense.<\/p>\n \u201cDid we ever figure out the ROI for IFE? I don\u2019t think so,\u201d Chi said. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive to buy entertainment from Hollywood, retrofitting aircraft with seatback monitors is so expensive \u2026 yet we have them. In the end, airlines need to look to the future, because Millennials will stop asking \u2018are we there yet?\u2019 if we have Wi-Fi. We need to get the experience right.\u201d<\/p>\n It helps that the return part of the equation is also starting to becoming clearer as the ability to extract data from an aircraft in real time and use that data to manage a fleet more efficiently is becoming more and more possible. That can involve fuel savings, maintenance scheduling benefits or something as simple as the improved tracking of valuable assets.<\/p>\n It could also concern weather. Rockwell Collins\u2019 Sr. Program Manager Dan Marek said one focus of the company is taking radar and weather data off of all active aircraft, stitching it all together into one comprehensive picture on the ground, and sending it back to pilots for more efficient route planning and adjustment.<\/p>\n The benefits are even more stark with new aircraft like the Airbus<\/strong> A350 that are purpose-built to be connected. For example, Scandinavian Airlines<\/strong> invested in the A350 and will be using Rockwell Collins\u2019<\/strong> ARINC GLOBALink Media Independent Aircraft Messaging (MIAM) service. With the service, Rockwell will pull data from aircraft in flight so it can be parsed on the ground. If the data is deemed immediately relevant, it will run through MIAM to compress it and sent immediately back to the plane through normal means \u2014 ACARS, satcom, etc. Other types of data packages are automatically held until the A350 lands and connects to the 4G network, at which point the MIAM service pushes it.<\/p>\n It will be some time before enough information on the exact cost savings from these processes is available to know what the ROI is, and even more time before like methods are wide-spread enough for that to be relevant beyond aircraft such as the A350. But that the horizon appears to hold a growing number of use cases for efficiency and savings from an operational standpoint would seem to help make a case that Chi is building on logic, not numbers: Wi-Fi is becoming an integral part of passengers\u2019 experience, and if the experience isn\u2019t up to par, the next steps don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You might expect people speaking at the 2018 Global Connected Aircraft Summit to represent companies more invested in connectivity than any other. You might be surprised. While many passengers, especially Millennials, expect In-Flight Connectivity (IFC) on their flights, it can be difficult to make the business case that it\u2019s a worthy investment for airlines, according […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}