Thales – Good Luck Comes In Pairs!
This was a pretty good year for Thales if AIX is any barometer of the economic weather for the French giant (2011 – 13.2 B Euros). The California-based, IFE arm of the the company has hit what looks to be a home run. For Thales CEO Alan Pelligrini, it all appears to be coming together to plan. For starters, Thales just secured their first B787 line fit customer (unnamed) for AVANT to be delivered in the 2014 time-frame on an Airbus A350 XWB aircraft. The Crystal Cabin winning product is Android friendly and a new App Portal has just been commissioned to support it. (Interestingly, due to overwhelming demand beta registration for the Thales Android App Portal is now closed. Watch for the launch soon.) AVANT is now in it’s fifth generation and the jumbo passenger touch screens/web cam will be sporting gesture control in the next generation. Yes, we see a live face-time app in your flying future. The launch customer for AVANT is QATAR Airways. We predict, AVANT will be Thales biggest seller yet.
Number two in the good news department is the show announcement of a joint venture with China Electronics Technology Avionics (CETCA) to provision IFE on China’s COMAC C919. With some 4000 single-aisle planes forecast in China’s future, Thales is in a great position to capture a lion’s share of that business.
The C919 is a 156 to 190 seat jetliner competing with the likes of the A320neo and B737 MAX. Thales will be involved in integration and future sales to other Chinese customers. CETCA’s General Manager, Zeng Li was on hand at AIX to sign the agreement and it was obvious that he felt Thales had their foot in the China door. Time will tell.
On completely different matters, we submit the following two topics:
INFOGRAPHICS
Remember our recent comments on the use of infographics at OnAir? It appears that others have the same idea and we stand by our recommendation for their use in this communication heavy industry. Getting your point across quickly is the name of the game and the trucking folks seem to think accordingly. One good read and I know all I ever wanted to know about trucking. Can you say the same about your communication tools and products?
CONNECTIVITY
Here is a short read on an outsiders view of inflight telephony with some interesting statistics… and great reader comments.
'Future–proofing' the IFE installation means providing an onboard network with sufficient bandwidth that the airline will never have to tear apart their airplane to re-wire to install upgrades. Fiber-to-the-Seat™ provides a fiber optics network running at a gigabit per second – High-definition video is only the beginning – who knows what the hot, killer apps will be 10-20 years from now?!”