Soon, even 10,000 feet in the sky, you've got mail
Every day we move closer to the promise of full broadband wireless Internet access in the palm of your hand. The plans for delivering that broadband access to an airplane in cruise at the flight levels are less promising. There are enough technology, government, and copyright issues to keep engineers, bureaucrats, and lawyers busy for years. Meanwhile, there's a company that uses existing technology to keep you and your passengers tuned in to news summaries, stock quotes, weather updates, sports highlights, movies, and e-mail. And the same system can be used by passengers to tune out the world and enjoy their favorite movie or music.
Airshow Inc. began in 1980 when two California businessmen, Steve Long and Allen Muesse, developed a lightweight video entertainment system for general aviation. The first system consisted of a TV/VCR with an Atari interface. The components came in a wooden box that was strapped into one of the seats. Over the years hardware evolved and Airshow moved into the content business. The company currently offers a variety of software and hardware products for private jets and airliners.
For those interested in staying in touch with developments on terra firma, several content packages are available. Airshow TV International is the first airborne satellite TV system for business jets. Airshow Network provides news, stocks, sports, and weather updates in text format. Airshow 400 is a topographic moving-map display. Airshow Mail means you've always got mail. For those interested in a temporary escape from terra firma, Airshow offers movies and music via the Entertainer, a DVD drive, CD changer, and the moving-map display in a single 12-pound unit.
Building the information superhighway was a breeze compared to building the information airway. Each of these technologies presents its own set of challenges when adapted to an airplane. Satellite TV, for instance. The satellites are in geosynchronous orbit. Adjusting the azimuth to lock those satellites to a stationary dish on your roof or in your backyard is tough enough. When we're flying somewhere, by definition we are out of geosynchronous orbit, but the dish still needs to lock even though it's moving through the air at near-Mach speeds. Fortunately, a computer can use the same GPS data that we use to navigate the airplane to steer the dish from satellite to satellite as the airplane moves through the air. A fuselage-mounted unit descrambles the signal and allows four different programs to be viewed at the same time on individual cabin monitors.
Dish size is also a challenge. Obviously, mounting the 6-foot dish from your backyard on your airplane is not an aerodynamically suitable option. Airshow TV uses an 18-inch dish mounted in the top of the tail. An 18-inch dish is still not an option for turboprops and some small jets, but it's barely noticeable on a Gulfstream V. The rule of thumb is that if an airplane is too small for a satcom antenna, it's too small for the dish. (The tail can house both Airshow TV and satcom antennas, since the Airshow TV antenna won't effect L-band satcom wavelengths.)
Since satellites are aimed at the land masses, coverage is excellent there, but it's not so great in transoceanic flight. The good news is that reception at the flight levels does improve over land because there are fewer meteorological and atmospheric disturbances between you and the satellite. And, as you might expect from a line-of-sight system, coverage is spotty at best over the polar caps.
Airshow Network has two components, one in the cabin and one in the cockpit. The cabin display lets you sort and retrieve news, stocks, sports, and weather information. Let's say you want all the baseball scores, but you don't care for tennis. Or you want quotes and news for your portfolio of stocks. When you sign up for the service you fill out a profile, which is logged into the computers at Airshow's Tustin, California, headquarters. When you initiate a request, Airshow looks at your profile, prepares your update, and ships it to the airplane. Network operates via satcom or VHF radiotelephone, and a typical news and stock update takes between 60 and 90 seconds to retrieve.
The cockpit display uses the same technology to retrieve WSI real-time weather in both text and graphical form. And the crew also has access to the same news, stocks, and sports updates as the passengers.
The Network offers Bloomberg News, CNN News, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, Sports Ticker from ESPN, and weather from WSI and Intellicast. Executive Office is a new Network service that delivers private company news, reports, e-mail, faxes, and files—sort of like an Intranet in the air.
In May of this year Airshow introduced the iSYS Intelligent Cabin Systems, a single-button panel system that passengers can operate from their seats. Infrared or RF (radio frequency) remote controls are also available. The backbone of the system is the video display, and Airshow will be introducing its own line of flat-panel LCD monitors at NBAA 2000 in New Orleans this month.
The Airshow 400 is a topographic moving-map display designed to answer your passengers' "where are we now" questions. The map uses ARINC 429 data for position and displays data from a bank of CD-ROMs created by the Airshow graphics design staff. Maps are customized with geopolitical borders, city names, points of interest, and topographic landmarks such as mountains and rivers.
Airshow's graphics department spends a lot of time customizing maps and graphics for corporate customers. Maps are in stunning detail and can be customized to show corporate offices or state capitals. Captions can be further customized in different languages. All graphics, from the start-up screen to the fasten-seatbelt sign, can be customized to display a corporate logo or reflect a personal choice of color or typestyle.
Airshow Mail, the newest product, premiered in June. The system uses a Pentium-based PC file server with Ethernet connections to the passengers' laptop computers. Airshow Mail's file server connects to Earth with either satcom or VHF radiotelephone. Both systems were designed for voice, and that's the current choke point for improving data transmission speeds to the kind of speeds that we've grown accustomed to on the ground. Satcom service, supplied by Inmarsat satellites, is worldwide, but different ground-based hardware around the globe can cause the data rates to vary widely. Some services can be as slow as 2,400 baud, while newer services claim to provide 64K service. Some services specialize in voice while others support voice and data. Both VHF radio and satcom phones provide synchronous (same speed going up as coming down) voice and data transmission.
Another transmission format with great promise is the asynchronous concept, which pairs the low-rate VHF radio or satcom to make a data request with a huge and fast direct broadcast satellite (DBS) to deliver the data. The technology—the radios and the dish—are in place, but it's just not cost effective to lease satellite time to deliver content to the small universe of private aircraft. The cost picture may change dramatically as demand from thousands of airline passengers is factored in.
The passenger connects to the on-board server and the server does the connection work, so the passenger can continue to work without tying up the computer. Airshow's system allows users to stop file transfers at any time, drop transfers to make phone calls, and resume e-mail uplink after the phone call to finish the transfer where it was dropped. Mail's software uses its own proprietary compression techniques to squeeze the data and improve transmission speeds. The server can accommodate five simultaneous users via Ethernet ports.
Most of the software for Airshow Mail resides on the cabin file server. All you need on your laptop is a small program that gives you access to the server. Then you can use Microsoft Outlook, Lotus, Eudora, or your e-mail program of choice. Or messages can be created without a laptop using the Airshow cabin management system. Airshow Mail will work with all but the very oldest airborne phone systems.
Adapting a PC for use as an airborne file server presented another set of challenges. Airshow Marketing Director Marty Hamilton explains, "First we have to assure that the product is airworthy. That means we look at emissions, like electrical fields or radio waves. Weight is also an issue. Then we look at vibration and cooling. The factory packaging of a CD player or a personal computer isn't airworthy, so we move the components into packaging that we've designed that meet those standards." Airshow's AirPlay division is in charge of adapting, designing, and building the airworthy components.
Power is an issue, too. Airshow offers units for both 28-volt DC and 110 volts at 400 Hz AC systems. The standard response of a PC power supply to a power surge is to shut down and wait for a reboot. So Airshow engineers had to design a power supply for the e-mail file server to handle the momentary power surge created by switching from an APU to ship's power.
Maybe the greatest challenge of in-flight entertainment is the listening environment. It's hard to imagine delivering high-quality surround sound to a group of off-center seats in a tube using anything but a system of discrete headphones. Several companies, including Airshow, are working on it. Meanwhile, the Lake InFlight Theatre system may offer the best solution to date. LIFT encodes movies with the Dolby Headphone surround process, which delivers six-channel surround sound through a conventional headphone. (This is not an Airshow product.)
About 300 employees work in Airshow offices in Tustin, California; Kirkland, Washington; Wichita; Newark, Delaware; and Toulouse, France. The headquarters in Tustin, near Orange County's John Wayne Airport, develops content for the Network, delivers the mail, and customizes the maps and other graphics. Tustin is also home to the corporate offices, tech support, and shipping.
Tustin also houses a parallel division of Airshow that develops hardware and content for the airlines. Airshow's Journey Management concept customizes activity and information based on triggers such as destination, altitude, time to destination, and aircraft location. Passengers would see news, weather, and information about their destination at different times during the flight. The system can be programmed to display information on points of interest en route as the aircraft flies near them. They can also deliver airline-customized messages about similar destinations or other travel promotions. The system can provide separate programming for first class, business class, and coach. And it isn't just for heavy jets. In July, the company introduced FlightView, a low-cost, low-weight audio and video system for narrow-body and regional aircraft. Airshow currently has passenger information systems in service on nearly 4,000 corporate aircraft and more than 130 airlines worldwide.
Growth in Airshow's airline business should be good news for GA, too. Look for content to improve as the audience and the demand for airborne information and entertainment grow. The universe of corporate aircraft is about 10,000, and only about half of those can accommodate an 18-inch dish. That's too small a market to attract most content providers.
Prices for hardware should also benefit from the economy of scale. Airshow's smallest GA unit, the Entertainer, sells for about $27,000. A full-blown iSYS system in a private 747 can cost up to $500,000. Airshow sells and support the products, but installations are handled by completion centers and FBOs. Installation downtimes are being shortened as Airshow works with airframe manufacturers to incorporate Ethernet cables and passenger switches into their designs.
The Promised Land of broadband is coming. Considering how fast we've moved from twisted copper pairs to fiber optics, we're probably not far from wireless teleconferencing, both on the ground and in the air. If you see your airplane as the last bastion of privacy from the hectic world below, you still have the option of turning everything off. But if you want to stay connected, or your passengers need to stay connected, or you just want your passengers to have as much fun in the cabin as you're having flying the airplane, tune in to Airshow.
For more information, contact Airshow, 2742 Dow Avenue, Tustin, California 92780; telephone 714/669-1300; fax 714/730-1698; e-mail [email protected]; or visit the Web site ( www.airshowinc.com). Joe Godfrey is a private pilot, composer, and aviation writer.
