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Business aviation is currently experiencing its own version of “Keeping up with the Joneses.” But it’s not wealth that corporate, personal, and charter jet operators are looking to flaunt – it’s capacity. Specifically the capacity of their in-cabin connectivity options for passengers.
Last October, I had the opportunity to join the Collins Aerospace team at the annual 2024 NBAA Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition (NBAA-BACE). This event brings charter companies, business aviation professionals, and industry partners together to discuss ongoing trends and changes in the larger business aviation industry and the new technologies impacting how personal, business, and charter aviation organizations operate.
This event is always an incredible opportunity for me to speak directly with our customers in the business aviation industry and learn about their priorities for the coming year. Interestingly enough, one of those priorities involves providing a new service that the passengers themselves are demanding – primarily because they hear about it all the time in their daily lives.
Keeping up with the Joneses
For years, business aviation organizations were hesitant to adopt high-throughput satellite connectivity for their passengers. They were partly concerned about the cost of offering their passengers what felt more like a luxury than a necessity. They were also concerned about taking their jets out of service for a number of weeks to install the necessary terminals and equipment.
However, thanks to massive digital transformation across practically every industry, connectivity on business jets shifted from a “nice to have” capability to something practically essential. The desire to access video calls, streaming entertainment, productivity applications in the cloud, and other digital solutions was simply too great to ignore, and many business aviation organizations embraced satellite connectivity services to meet this demand.
But now we’re seeing another shift in passenger demands and requirements.
The satellite companies that enable connectivity for business aviation organizations have not generally been household names. But the satellite capacity that these companies offer from constellations of satellites in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) is something the average business aviation passenger has inevitably used and benefitted from without ever knowing who provided it.
However, a number of high-profile and widely-known satellite services have since been introduced. Today, passengers on business, charter, and private flights know these companies by name, and understand the capabilities that their Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can provide. They may even see other executives or business aviation companies embracing these services and want them for themselves.
This has created two related trends in the business aviation industry, both of which were on full display at the NBAA Conference.
No plans, new plans
Despite business aviation passengers’ interest in LEO connectivity, I interacted with few business aviation decision-makers at the NBAA Conference who were actually planning to adopt it. That’s because many of the decision-makers I had conversations with wanted to meet the demands of their passengers but were concerned about embracing LEO connectivity solutions for multiple reasons.
First, much like when in-cabin connectivity became a hot commodity, they’re hesitant to take their aircraft out of service. Aircraft uptime and availability is essential for these organizations – especially charter companies – and the four or five weeks needed to ground and upgrade the satellite hardware can be a dealbreaker for many of these organizations.
Next, reliability and support are both essential in the business aviation industry. Customers want to know their satellite solutions are tried, tested, and trusted. They also want the peace of mind of having existing relationships with their connectivity partners’ maintenance and support teams. The newer LEO solutions lack the long and trusted track record of many of their older, more established competitors in the satellite industry.
Finally, there’s really no need for LEO connectivity on aircraft today. The traditional use cases for in-cabin connectivity on business aircraft simply don’t require the low latency of a LEO satellite service. In fact, some use cases, such as video calls, can be negatively impacted by the frequent satellite hand-overs required for LEO satellite connectivity.
This means that business aviation organizations might spend money on new equipment and unnecessarily ground their own aircraft just to embrace a new connectivity partner that has a shorter history than existing partners and offers a solution they don’t really need.
However, while there may be no plans for wide LEO satellite adoption across the business aviation industry, there are new plans that could help meet passenger demands without significant investment by business aviation organizations.
One of the interesting trends that I observed at the NBAA Conference was a proliferation of new, uncapped data plans from traditional satellite operators and service providers. These new plans offer increased capacity to enable the simultaneous use of multiple digital services in flight but are delivered via higher-latency GEO satellite networks.
For example, weeks before the NBAA Conference, ViaSat unveiled its new JetXP service, a GEO satellite connectivity for aviation customers with, “…uncapped speeds, expanded capacity, and increased network prioritization.” This plan was inspired at least partially by the company’s 2024 business aviation in-flight connectivity survey, which found, “…reliability, coverage, consistency, value for money and overall experience…were deemed more important than fast speeds alone.”
As Kai Tang, Head of Business Aviation at Viasat, explained, “Customers are savvy enough to understand that speed alone will never meet their requirements and beyond a certain bandwidth threshold, higher speed has little impact on actual passenger experience. As the breadth and depth of criteria used to assess connectivity becomes more mature, the days of speed test decision-making are over. Operators are looking at the overall experience, and that’s where JetXP really excels.”
While business aviation passengers seem to be increasingly discussing LEO services, it seems they are really searching for the ability to use multiple advanced digital services simultaneously. The evolution in service and data plans from traditional GEO satellite operators ensure that charter, business, and private jet operators can meet the needs of their passengers without having to invest heavily, ground jets, or rely on a newer vendor with which they have little experience.
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