Photo: Valor Consultancy

Inmarsat and Honeywell Aerospace announced a new in-flight connectivity (IFC) service for business aviation on Monday. SwiftJet is set to debut in the first half of 2023 and offer L-band service from Inmarsat’s upgraded L-band network Elera. 

Inmarsat said SwiftJet will offer global coverage, with maximum speeds of 2.6 Mbps, which it claims is up to six times faster than Inmarsat’s existing L-band business aviation connectivity solution, SwiftBroadband (SBB). The company said this speed can support video calls, cloud collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and TikTok and YouTube, which were previously challenging over L-band. 

SwiftJet will be available alongside Inmarsat’s other business aviation IFC services, Jet ConneX Ka-band service known as JX, and the SwiftBroadband L-band service, which functions as a secondary system or primary connectivity for smaller or older aircraft.

Inmarsat said this development comes as business aviation travel is returning to pre-pandemic levels, and customers have “unprecedented demand” for IFC. 

“Inmarsat developed SwiftJet in response to customer and partner feedback for a faster, more advanced L-band offering. They essentially asked us to amplify L-band capabilities without losing its trademark characteristics of resilience, reliability and availability,” said Kai Tang, Inmarsat’s head of Business Aviation. 

SwiftJet uses hardware from Honeywell, which can be equipped on a broad range of aircraft and also supports cockpit and safety services. It can serve the smaller jet market, which has previously been restricted to basic voice or text connectivity, Inmarsat said. Existing SBB customers will not have to replace any externally-mounted equipment.