CABIN Electronics 1.qxp_Finance 27/10/2021 16:34 Page 1
CABIN ELECTRONICS
Five Must-Have Bizjet Cabin Electronics Retrofits MRO centers performing business aircraft cabin refurbishments are seeing clear trends in the types of functionality and electronics equipment their customers are requesting for retrofit. Three leading MRO providers discuss those trends with Chris Kjelgaard.
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n conversations with AvBuyer, three leading North America-based bizjet MRO providers report that many of their customers are telling the providers much the same thing. The customers want exactly the same internet, video, audio and lighting capabilities in their aircraft as they have in their homes. Not only that, but they want to be able to control those capabilities remotely, from controllers and, increasingly, from their personal electronic devices (PEDs). “More and more people want what’s in their house, for their airplane,” says Dennis Kruse, a Senior Avionics Sales Representative for Duncan Aviation. The three MRO providers interviewed agree that, when onboard, their customers want to be able to stream video, audio and text content to their PEDs where possible. Each person in the bizjet cabin wants to be able to individually consume the content he or she is most interested in (rather than everyone on board having to look at a wall-mounted screen and thus have no individual content choice). Meanwhile, increasingly, because of the rapid pace of technological advancement in household consumer electronics — which has made voice-activated devices and controllers such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Assistant commonplace — business jet owners and operators are hoping soon to be able to 92 Vol 25 Issue 11 2021 AVBUYER MAGAZINE
control their cabin electronics by voice too. Indeed, in launching its Challenger 3500 Bombardier recently announced that the aircraft would feature an element of voice control for its cabin systems. Given that the Challenger 3500 launch may also have signaled the launch of the fifth generation of Lufthansa Technik’s Nice Touch cabin management system [the timing squares well with LHT’s previous comments to AvBuyer on when it would complete development of the new-generation system], it seems likely that LHT has designed the new iteration of Nice Touch with voice-activated control at its heart. All these trends — involving increased and individually streamed consumption of content, new electronics control capabilities, individually enabled (rather than centralized) cabin-control functions, and more sophisticated monitoring of all cabin functions — will rely on there being enough wireless connectivity to the cabin to support each of the improved capabilities. Apart from anything else, aircraft owners today want their video content to be at least viewable in high definition, if not in 4K definition, all of which takes bandwidth of true broadband scale. So it will come as no major surprise to business jet owners and operators that the most-requested cabin electronics upgrade today by those refurbishing their aircraft is the installation, or upgrading, of wireless internet connectivity. www.AVBUYER.com
