Patrick Brannelly, vice president, corporate communications, marketing and brand product, publishing, digital and events, Emirates
Image Credit: Emirates

[Satellite TODAY 8-26-13] Emirates will be one of the airlines to watch when providing in-flight connectivity and entertainment services. The airline has long been a pioneer here and could be one to watch in the future. The airline actually installed phones on its aircraft back in 1993, so is now coming up to 20 years since it launched communications services. It is a significant user of Inmarsat satellite communications. Patrick Brannelly, vice president, corporate communications, marketing and brand product, publishing, digital and events, Emirates told Via Satellite the company has looked to be very progressive in this area. He says, “Passengers started using Internet on Emirates flights about 18-24 months ago. All our A380s have the Internet available, and our latest 380s now become quite connected, Internet/telephone/seat back telephones. We are very connected. We are trying to roll it out as quickly as possible across the whole fleet. You can now use your mobile phone on just over 50 percent of the fleet, over 100 aircraft. You can use the Internet across all the A380s. You have 35 A380s, which is a pretty large fleet flying all over the world. Connectivity is now one of our basic expected products by our passengers.”

One of the big challenges for the company will be how progressive the service gets, and whether the airline looks more at in-flight entertainment services. Brannelly admits this presents a lot of challenges for the company. He adds, “It is a struggle legally, and there is the question of why you would do this. In terms of our in-flight entertainment product, we have nearly 1500 channels right now. We are constantly adding more choice to suit the more international audience. Video is huge online. People are watching media. It is becoming easier to access content on personal devices. Even something like Blackberry Messenger has more of a video element now. People are using video in a more expansive way then they were even a year ago, so systems need to be able to cope with more streaming and more video. However, when it is live video to an aircraft, that has to focus on news and sports. We have live television on a couple of the aircraft. We are not taking the regular signal. It is a re-broadcast data signal. It is not easy, and quite complicated to do this kind of live television, but people do want to watch live sporting events and live news.”

Brannelly admits with the changing nature of how people access content, this marketplace is changing. He admits to being influenced on a recent trip to Asia in terms of how people are interacting with smart devices. He says, “I was in Korea recently. The country has almost 100 percent smartphone usage. People there are not just using their smartphones for email and communications. They have gone way beyond that stage. It was quite shocking to me and I think it’s obvious this demand is coming to the airline market. Connectivity will be like air, and we need to provide it. I am very positive in terms of the business outlook for connectivity demand.”

Take-up rates of services on aircraft have been positive. “We want all of these systems to work at 99.99 percent of the time. It is really the final hurdle. On certain routes such as New York, we are seeing eight percent plus of passengers connecting. The flight is over 13 hours, and the take-up is tremendous,” admits Brannelly.

However, while Brannelly is positive about the potential demand for services, there are many frustrations when offering these services, not least getting fixes for problems in the systems. He adds, “There are many points of failure in a system as complex as in-flight communications. Often when they do the analysis and come out with the fix, the fix was entirely predictable and the players in the food chain of communications had not done as good a job with testing scenarios as they should have done. This is very frustrating. Avionics that go on aircraft should be tested to a very high standard. We are seeing an issue at the moment and we are being told we won’t have the fix until Q1 2014. That is absolutely absurd for us to wait that many months to get a fix. Software bugs don’t just happen just in this industry. It happens to the best of them including Apple – which is rushing out a WiFi fix to their latest update, but they’ll do that in a matter of days. I think some of the big players in our industry need to be able to respond faster.”