20th Anniversary Issue: Inflight
Revolution in the air
October 1st 2013
A revolution had already begun in the aircraft cabin when the first issue of Orient Aviation hit the streets in 1993. Until the early nineties the average airline passenger sat upright for their journeys, watched limited entertainment on drop down TV screens and whiled away the hours listening to music with headphones that never stayed long on your ears. Read More »
Plump inflight magazines full of elegant articles and scores of ads were tucked into the seatbacks, there were foot rests throughout the cabin and everybody received an amenities bag. Travelling was still a once in a life time experience for most people.
Passengers could smoke on board, carry-on luggage was rarely weighed and the galley never ran out of food.
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| In the 1990s seat back TV replaced drop-down screens, today Wi-Fi connectivity is the new gold standard for cabin upgrades |
But by 1993, the shift in the passenger experience that began with the first in-seat personal TV aboard a Northwest Airline aircraft in 1988, was turning into a tide that became a technological and social avalanche of change.
Today, passengers are liberated. Their flights are experiences of their choice that they can largely tailor. Increasingly, they travel in a personalized world where journeys are in physical or electronic cocoons - or both. They book seats at home after viewing the cabin layout, check-in remotely – and with the arrival of inseat power – have open-ended access to their laptop and entertainment preferences. Forget the clunky battery charger in the hand luggage.
In 2013, Wi-Fi connectivity has become the new gold standard for cabin upgrades. Trend-setting Asia-Pacific carriers are outfitting their planes with Wi-Fi that will bring content directly to passengers’ electronic devices.
Travellers will surf the internet and send and reply to emails or sms on their phones. Crews are managing the cabin with electronic tablets, passengers watch or listen to their own choice of entertainment with an array of personal electronic devices and headphones.
A recent SITA survey said 93% of airlines have mobile services for passengers as a top investment priority by 2016. Fifty eight percent of carriers are prepared to invest in major inflight entertainment connectivity (IFEC) upgrades.
The pace and the cost of keeping up with the airline Joneses is punishing. As airlines race to keep up with passenger expectations that match the experiences of their customers on the ground, staples of the airline journey are disappearing.
Handsets with misbehaving retracting chords are disappearing. Touch screens are becoming the norm. Seats lie flat or couple up. At the very least, they offer a respectable recline at the click of a button.
Clunky set-top boxes that stole leg room are becoming obsolete. Passengers can shop inflight with real-time clearance on their credit cards and have their goods delivered to their door.
Business class cabins first appeared in the Eighties. By the 1990s, the smartest airline marketeers began to offer some of the comforts of business class in the economy cabin. Singapore Airlines (SIA) and the then fledgling Middle East carrier, Emirates Airline, fitted their economy cabins with seatback PTVs that offered free movies, television series and music.
There was talk of charging passengers, but that idea soon faded away when it became clear that inflight entertainment was a critical differentiator when travellers chose an airline – especially in a region with a huge number of long-haul sectors.
In fact, the Nineties was the decade of IFE – and now, in the first 20 years of this century, IFEC at the region’s airlines. By the early 2000s, passengers, in even the cheapest seats of the leading Asia-Pacific carriers, could enjoy a broad choice of entertainment they could control via AVOD (Audio& Video on Demand).
SIA was the first Asia-Pacific airline to put its entertainment on demand in the entire airline cabin. In 1999, Cathay Pacific Airways was hailed for having up to 30 movies available for its first class passengers to view at any time during a flight.
Video cassettes had given way to compact disks (CD) then the Digital Video Disk (DVD). The DVD also altered the cumbersome delivery and uploading of entertainment of past times. The DVD could hold seven times the data of a CD and weighed considerably less.
Fast forward to September 2013, when the first of SIA’s upgraded B777-300ERs was rolled out. All cabin classes in the Singapore-based carrier’s latest upgrade will have larger LCD touch screens, with integrated handsets for passengers to multi-task tracking of live news and the journey’s flight path, inseat power and the ability for travellers to share their experience with each other.
On offer will be more than 230 movies, 340 television programmes and 790 CDs as well as 80 interactive games including 3D options.
However the future beckons – and very soon. Coming soon is an era of BYOE – bring your own entertainment on board.
Not only will carriers provide tailored content based on the individual preferences of each passenger, but in-air Wi-Fi will soon become the norm. Passengers will bring aboard their electronic device of choice and plug into the world of email, sms, and their favourite TV series, or stored on their own mobile device or on a tablet provided by the airline.
Of course, it has not been perfect along the way. IFE reliability was notoriously unreliable for much of the Nineties and in the early years of this century. A decade ago, at a leading IFE conference, Colin Stuart, who was then at Airbus, described it as “awful”. No cabin attendant or engineer would disagree.
In 2013, crews are equipped with iPads for real time cabin service, management, maintenance and real-time passenger satisfaction feedback. Social media has arrived onboard. Unreliable IFEC has nowhere to hide.
In a recent SITA survey, nine out of 10 airlines intend to engage passengers via mobiles by 2015 and 93% of airlines worldwide said they would make mobile services for passengers a priority.
If the past is quite a story as we said in our 20th anniversary introduction, then the future of airline IFEC will be something else.
Stubbed out
For airlines operating in a region where so many of its major markets have high populations of smokers, the 1990s global campaigns for banning smoking in all public places, including airliners, sent shudders through the revenue management departments of many major regional carriers, particularly in North Asia. But the non-smoking and public health lobbying was effective and airlines bowed to public pressure.
By the mid-Nineties, smoking onboard was banned on all airlines in the region. A few years later the only refuge for smokers at a majority of the airports in the Asia-Pacific was glass boxes filled with fumes and the pariahs of the world – smokers.
Beds, bars and F&B
Beds, or near lie flat beds, were the prerogative of first class until British Airways unveiled its prototype of beds for all business class cabins. The ingenious herringbone design resulted in an avalanche of announcements from the region’s top carriers that they too would offer lie flat beds in business class and discard the near flat seats of the past.
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| Lie-flat beds, a given for business class customers today |
Soon some airlines converted their first cabin to suites. By the time the A380 was flying, innovative carriers offered showers for their top paying passengers. Some of the region’s carriers followed the example of Virgin Atlantic and provided inflight masseuses.
However, when some passengers on their North Asian routes put a lie flat bed and a masseuse together and came up with the mile high equivalent to their favourite girlie bar, there was a rethink on the service.
Bars have been thinner in the air than predicted. Virgin has maintained the convivial service along with some A380 operators, but it is not a trend that airlines have fostered.
The opposite trajectory applies to the airport lounge where levels of service and comfort have escalated, especially in the last decade. The region’s airlines continue to invest millions in a continual cycle of upgrades of the airport facility.
Cathay Pacific Airways will soon have four lounges at its home airport in Hong Kong.
Alas, Ansett International’s innovative Chefs on Board, where fully qualified chefs were put through flight attendant training so they could oversee the inflight production of the carrier’s F&B, died along with the Australian airline a few years into the new century.
IFE non-starters
One of the biggest airline boo boos of the last decade was the failure of gaming onboard. Apparently straight-laced SIA proved it was quite the opposite when it agreed to the installation of gaming onboard in the Nineties.
Swiss Air also said yes to gaming onboard, but the predictions of annual revenue of US$1 million per plane from bored gambling prone passengers were so wide of the mark that every single inflight gaming company failed, losing its golf playing professional class investors in the pre-dotcom bust tens of millions of U.S. dollars.
For SIA, it was not a financial problem because the gaming companies bore the costs of installation and manpower.
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| Passengers will be able to use their own phones in flight for emails and sms |
Practically every airline under the sun installed inflight phones and faxes onboard and they sat isolated and alone for many years onboard. Of the several factors that blighted their success two stood out. Firstly, hardly anybody wanted to call anyone inflight. Secondly, if they did the charges were too high. Data connectivity has killed off the inflight phone.
Pay per view was another idea - some inveterate salesmen called it a business proposition – that failed to flourish. Orient Aviation still remembers the day speakers told a conference that AVOD would never take off unless it was paid for by the passenger. Admittedly, some of the low-cost carriers do charge for IFE, but that was not what they meant then.
Another howler was the pronouncement by the promoters of live air to ground TV that “VOD (Video on Demand). Forget it. We think we will leap frog VOD with live television”.
Ancillary revenue, a cash cow
U.S. low-cost carrier, Southwest Airlines, is largely credited with bringing the big, bouncing baby of ancillary revenue to the airline world. It showed the way to unbundling, upselling and charging for anything the passenger wants onboard.
Cash strapped legacy carriers, especially in the post 9/11 world, attached themselves like grateful leeches to the revenue opportunities the business model offered. As passengers become used to paying for their inflight food and drink, some proportion of their luggage, entertainment and seat preferences, non-LCCs plunged into the abundant revenue stream and liked the experience – very much.
Even some of the most elite airlines of the region, who walk away with the top awards for their cabin and airport offerings year after year, attribute ancillary revenue an essential element of their annual financial performance. One airline analyst said recently: “The day when we can view the [airline] industry as an industry of air travel retailers is fast approaching”.
But a challenge remains. Asia-Pacific airlines must have the technology for passengers to access myriad ancillary revenue opportunities that will be increasingly driven by the passenger’s mobile device.
Retail and inflight sales, priority seating, lounge access, charging separately for baggage or hand luggage and insurance produce core revenue for airlines, but only technology will allow them to sustain and increase this profit stream.
Premium economy – what do we think?
Premium economy is popular, but is it popular enough to justify the multi-million dollar investment required to refit and re-configure the cabins of scores of airplanes in the fleets of the region’s non-LCC carriers?
The answer is probably yes – but it has not happened yet.
Reactions from passengers of airlines that have installed premium economy cabins are mixed. In the demanding Asia-Pacific, they ask if a pre-take-off glass of bubbly, a slightly bigger seat pitch and a slightly wider seat justifies the substantial fare differential between economy and premium economy.
Frequent flyers also are grumpy about a new trend in airline seat allocations: these loyalty flyers booked in economy, if upgraded, are sent to premium rather than business class on overbooked flights.
