Back seat driver

When it comes to in-flight entertainment (IFE), Middle Eastern carriers are among the most ambitious in the world.

Emirates’ Panasonic-based Information Communications Entertainment (ICE) service, offering hundreds of on-demand films and music tracks, is regarded as one of the best of its kind. Etihad gives its first-class passengers huge 23-inch screens to watch content served up by Thales TopSeries hardware.

Panasonic and Thales dominate the market for top-of-the-range in-seat IFE . But they do it with system architectures that have stayed practically the same for a couple of decades. While the two manufacturers continue to evolve their products to enhance performance and cut weight, volume and power requirements, they still believe in centralisation. Hundreds of gigabytes of movies and other content are held on powerful “head end” servers and dished out on demand to “dumb terminal” screens in the seat.

French aircraft seat manufacturer Sicma believes there’s a better way – one that halves weight, cost and power demands compared with the traditional approach, and offers enough processing power to support brand-new entertainment options such as 3D games. As a newcomer to the IFE market, Sicma needed a launch customer with the confidence to challenge the established order. Earlier this year it found one in Royal Jordanian Airlines.

By ordering Sicma’s new Seat Integrated Technology (SiT) system for installation in its quartet of Airbus A340-200s the Amman-based carrier is going where few airlines anywhere in the world have dared to tread for many years. Conscious that quality of IFE service can lose as well as win customers, the airlines are very conservative in their choice of audio/video-on-demand (AVOD) suppliers, playing safe by sticking to the big two of Panasonic and Thales.

Among the exceptions are carriers that have turned to hand-held IFE as a way of offering entertainment quickly, flexibly and at reasonable cost. One of the prime attractions of this solution is the fact that it demands no complex work in the cabin and can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice by simply wheeling the cartload of hand-held players off the aircraft. There’s more to installing SiT than that, but Sicma says it’s still much more straightforward than putting in the conventional systems, with their big head ends and multiple boxes.

The secret of SiT is the way it puts all of the available content into every seat, storing it right under the passenger’s fingertips in the Seat Display Unit (SDU). Capable of being mounted in the seatback or on a fold-out arm, the SDU is essentially a standalone PC with a high-resolution 10-inch screen, a 1GHz processor, 1Gb of RAM and a 250Gb hard drive – enough for 85 typical films.
Sicma says that decentralising in this way eliminates the possibility of the multi-seat failures that can plague conventional systems, as well as speeding up response when the passenger selects new content. It also means that the IFE hardware can be built into the seat right from the start, eliminating some of the integration and retrofit issues that currently add cost and complexity.

By existing standards, the rest of SiT is lightness and simplicity itself: a small (1kg) SiT Interface Box (SIB) and a gigabit-rated optical ethernet network for the delivery every few weeks of new content loads to the SDUs; one power box for every four seats, one passenger control unit per seat, a crew control unit, and a 1kg Aircraft Interface Box (AIB) to integrate other functions such as air-to-ground connectivity and a moving-map display.

Sicma’s claims to superior installability are founded on being able to deliver the seats with their IFE provision already in place. Then it’s just a matter of securing the seats on their tracks, installing the power supplies and other small boxes, running the content-delivery ethernet cable along the existing raceways in the floor, plugging in power and switching on.

“We estimate that the complete installation will weigh around 2.9kg per passenger across 30 seats in business class and 229 in economy aboard Royal Jordanian’s A340s,” said Loic Bouet, SiT product manager at Sicma. “This compares with a figure of at least 4.5kg for a typical conventional system. Our cost, depending on aircraft type, is $4-6,000 per passenger, half as much as for the competition, and power consumption is 35W/passenger against 66W.”

Work on the first A340 should now be under way at Royal Jordanian’s base in Amman . The aim is to complete all four aircraft by September of next year and to have the installation certificated by EASA and Jordan ’s Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission. SiT will then be used to deliver in full commercial service a range of IFE offerings that is now being finalised. The airline is also considering installations for its Airbus A310s, with the final decision depending on how much longer the twinjets are likely to stay in the fleet.

The Airbuses are due to be replaced with Boeing 787s some time after 2012, opening up the possibility that in due course a satisfied Royal Jordanian may be pushing to have SiT approved for installation in the new twinjet. If that happens, a Middle East carrier will have played a central role in ushering a new player and a new way of doing things into an IFE systems market currently dominated by two heavyweight incumbents.