“In the two years since we’ve launched the Connected Aircraft [in April 2017], we have put over 2,000 systems out into the marketplace,” Peterson told FINN. “It’s by far and away the single most successful largest launch of a satellite data system into the marketplace, with the highest take-up rate in both business aviation, air transport as well as defence.”

Peterson says Honeywell’s Connected Aircraft offers connectivity as good as on the ground.

“Inmarsat has really helped us with that because they have a CIR (committed information rate) value. So the customers and the passengers who have invested in the system are guaranteed to get a minimum rate. and Inmarsat has consistently delivered on that rate,” Peterson said.

Honeywell’s JetWave satellite communications hardware powers Inmarsat’s Jet ConneX service as part of the Connected Aircraft suite.

Leveraging connectivity

Peterson says now that connectivity is working well in, customers are asking how else they can leverage it, beyond passengers surfing the Internet, etc.

He noted several areas Honeywell has expanded into since first launching its Connected Aircraft.

He said: “We’ve expanded the predictive maintenance aspect of it in terms of getting sensor information and being able to turn that into actions so that there are fewer delays and cancellations.”

Tip to tail

This now covers  10 ATA chapters and 60 parts, he said, providing insights into much more of the aircraft “from tip to tail”.

Connectivity is helping airlines manage fuel efficiency (with GoDirect Fuel Efficiency) as well as better plan around weather (with its GoDirect Weather Information Service), Peterson noted.

“Now we can provide a level of optimisation like airlines have never seen before with respect to congestion, weather, the type of flight route that they want to plan and fly.

“That’s delivering 10s of millions of dollars more profit to the airlines who participate in those tools.”

Block time

Real-time information is also cutting block time (the time it takes from pushing back from the departure gate to arriving at the destination gate).

“If you can get six minutes out of the block time and you can do that across every flight, you can squeeze more trips and more legs and get more utilisation out of your assets,” Peterson explained. “Again, more profitability to the airlines.”

He added: “We become really addicted to working on this with [the airlines] and we call it ‘packets to profits’. We’re trying to figure out which packets [of data] can we capture in order for an airline to deliver more profits to their shareholders.”

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