Starting From ZeroTouch: Panasonic Previews Flight Operations Platform Powered by Real-Time Data
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APEX Insight: Panasonic Avionics’ dynamic data-driven real-time platform could be a game changer for airline operations.
It was only six years ago that David Bruner sent his first e-mail in flight, feeling like he was on top of the world: “I’m at 82 degrees latitude, I’m sitting over nothing but snow in Greenland or northern Canada, somewhere, and look what I can do,” he recalls. This was circa 2010, when tablets, 4K TVs and gesture-controlled technology were on the rise. In-flight connectivity (IFC), however, was still in its infancy. “That used to be a novelty,” says Bruner, Panasonic Avionics’ vice-president of Global Communications, “and now nobody cares anymore.”
To better understand the rise in demand for broadband connectivity, picture Internet as water traveling to aircraft through pipes. In 2010, when Panasonic launched in-flight Wi-Fi with Lufthansa, the pipe was the diameter of a straw; now it’s grown twentyfold. Wi-Fi priorities have shifted from sending e-mail, a relatively low-bandwidth activity that requires only a trickle of Internet, to a full blast stream for live video. Ensuring that constant flow of connectivity is no easy feat. “Airplanes represent the hardest place to deliver a megabyte of data,” Bruner says.
Laying the Groundwork
Most companies in the business of beaming Internet to aircraft have origins in military, mining or marine markets, but as a subsidiary of Osaka-based Panasonic Corporation, known for manufacturing household appliances and television screen technology, Panasonic Avionics began with the consumer. Panasonic Avionics was founded in 1979, and designed and produced its first in-flight entertainment (IFE) system, installed on a Boeing 767-200, three years later. Today the company is located in Lake Forest, California, and equips the majority of commercial airplanes with its electronics. But most passengers don’t know this. “You would never know that it’s a Panasonic screen or a Panasonic headset,” says Brian Bardwell, Panasonic Avionics’ manager of Corporate Communications. As the company shifted from a consumer to business-to-business model, its branding disappeared. But, according to Bardwell, “if you look at display quality, you look at contrast ratios, you look at color palette, all that is directly related to results from the consumer television.”
“If you look at display quality, you look at contrast ratios, you look at color palette, all that is directly related to results from the consumer television.” €” Brian Bardwell, Panasonic Avionics
Over the years, Panasonic continued to evolve its IFE screens, releasing its connected and wireless platforms eX3 and eXW in 2011. Meanwhile, the company was also laying the groundwork for global connectivity, covering hard-to-reach areas over oceans and remote destinations like Greenland and China’s red-tape-bound airspace, where Panasonic is the only IFC supplier currently providing connectivity to Chinese registered airlines on both domestic and international flights. The global network is part of a massive project that’s been eight years in the making, but Bruner says, “It’s taken that long to actually figure out how we would do it.”
Unveiled at APEX EXPO in Singapore last year, Panasonic Avionics’ ZeroTouch is a dashboard that provides an overview of airline operations. It’s also a workflow management tool that can be configured for the individual user. The route network manager, customer service agent and chief executive could each have a different view showing tasks, information and analytics that are relevant to them. What will make this service so powerful is its ability to show real-time data, such as the condition of a piece of equipment or the data storage available on an aircraft.
“We want the airplane to remain connected so that [airlines] can push or pull anything at any time.” €” Paul Kent, Panasonic Avionics
“We want the airplane to remain connected so that [airlines] can push or pull anything at any time,” says Paul Kent, Panasonic Avionic’s manager of Global Communications Services Products. This could include alerting ground crew of a broken seat or a wet carpet so a technician can be called before landing, reducing the time an airplane is grounded for maintenance.
Equipment and mechanics on aircraft are expensive assets. Monitoring enables airlines to keep track of their condition. “Every minute it’s out of service is lost revenue to the airline,” Bruner says. “So keeping it healthy, being able to fix things very fast so that it never misses an operation, is really important.”
Breaking the Cycle
As critical as the operation of actual flights is to airlines, the real driver behind ZeroTouch is the cycle of loading movies onto airplanes. “This is a machine that runs all the time; just knowing what planes have been loaded with the new content, which ones haven’t, [is an] unbelievable logistic nightmare,” Bruner says. “We were doing it manually and we knew how frustrating and difficult this was.”
Every 30 days, Panasonic receives a batch of media files from different content service providers to perform quality control, checking for inaccuracies in the metadata or film edit and then packaging them onto a hard drive to be delivered onto airplanes by a ground technician. Multiply this across 300 airlines, some with fleets of more than 400 and various configurations of IFE systems and add the custom edits for different regions, licenses, subtitles and closed captioning – titles like Rogue One have up to 80 modifications. As demand for content expands, so does the problem.
“The volume of content has grown exponentially,” says Julie Lichty, director of Media and Creative Services, Panasonic Avionics, explaining that airlines use content to differentiate themselves. To satisfy passengers’ appetite for content, airlines are carrying larger IFE catalogs, but Kent says this is a gamble. “They’re purchasing titles that they’re hoping will get watched.” With ZeroTouch, airlines would be able to see which movies are performing well, whether a VIP passenger has a special movie request and essentially push and pull content on demand.
Movies might have been the impetus for the platform, but Bruner believes it’ll be the catalyst for something bigger. “This whole system is more than movies; it’s more than live news and things like that,” he says. “It’s going to change the entire way [airlines] operate, the way they fly aircraft.”
Power Shift
Airlines often load the same content across their entire fleet despite how different passenger preferences may be between different routes. Bruner says content could be more dynamic with ZeroTouch. “You know you’re going to have different demographics on a flight to a certain destination. Now you can actually differentiate that list of titles,” he says.
Kent and Bruner believe the technology could be a game changer for the industry. “It gives the power to the airline,” Kent says, “to go back to the content service providers, to go back to the studios and potentially reshape the way some of their contracts and negotiations and deals are done.” This could result in less custom edits, reducing some of the complexity of the process. “It won’t make the spend go down,” Bruner says, but “they’ll buy more titles, they’ll carry a larger inventory, which is really what passengers want.”
“You know you’re going to have different demographics on a flight to a certain destination. Now you can actually differentiate that list of titles.” €” David Bruner, Panasonic Avionics
ZeroTouch is currently in phase one of development, delivering payloads of 700 megabytes multiple times a day. More than ten airlines are currently using the platform for in-flight entertainment and connectivity content updates. Later this year, Panasonic will introduce a more robust infrastructure and management console, with full commercial availability to follow by the third quarter of this year.
“By changing the infrastructure that supports the business, where does this lead us? We look out on the horizon and we have a view of it, but we won’t know until people start taking advantage of it,” Bruner says. ZeroTouch will be the first step toward that.
“Starting From ZeroTouch” was originally published in the 7.2 April/May issue of APEX Experience magazine.