Aircraft

California-based IMS claims market leadership in the IFE handheld sector and here at Aircraft Interiors Expo the company is showing examples of how it intends to consolidate that position.

Exercising the minds of the IMS engineers are new concepts for the in-seat accommodation of the company’s players alongside passengers’ own devices – this work is on show here – and connectivity. Harry Gray, IMS sales and marketing VP believes that broadband connectivity is still in its infancy. “We’re talking with various airlines about broadband, and not just in relation to the portable players,” he says. “We will enable WiFi and associated support services as demand dictates.”

If connectivity is still undercooked, so too is the handheld IFE market itself, Gray believes. “The adoption rate has been low – in terms of seats served if not in the number of airlines - but it is growing. That trend can only be accelerated by the emergence of a variety of applications to go alongside handheld IFE services as an additional cabin amenity.” These applications include service recovery, rentals, and the provision of IFE for aircraft on short-term lease.

“The airlines have for a long time been under pressure from their passengers to have a reliable IFE system on the aircraft,” observes Gray. “Now portables allow them to go on offering a service if the primary IFE system fails. Better still, if the airline knows beforehand that IFE will not be available in a particular seat or zone, it can pre-empt the problem and maintain goodwill by going to the affected passengers immediately they board, apologising and issuing them with handhelds.”

At least one of IMS’ customer airlines has placed multiple repeat orders for service recovery purposes, Gray says, and the company is talking to another half dozen about this application.

While Gray sees rentals as a genuine opportunity, it’s far from easy money. “Making a return from rentals requires a number of things to come together,” he says. “The right content set must be offered to the right passenger demographic on the right flight duration by a fully engaged cabin crew. We have just signed an airline that plans to offer the players for rent – we will work with them as they seek to generate revenue.”

Airlines that lease to provide short-term gap-filling capacity pending the arrival of a new aircraft can face a dilemma – whether to offer a lower level of service in the leased aircraft or spend heavily to duplicate the IFE in the owned fleet. “In fact it’s usually completely uneconomic to put in a $3-6 million embedded system into aircraft on short-term lease,” says Gray. “On the other hand, a portable solution could be implemented very quickly and at reasonable cost and would not take each aircraft out of revenue service for a month at a time for installation work.”

In general, Gray maintains, handheld inflight entertainment must have a growing role to play at a time of global financial insecurity, and when IFE is spreading down through the air transport industry from its traditional niche among the top-level carriers.

The right content set must be offered to the right passenger demographic on the right flight duration by a fully engaged cabin crew - Harry Gray

“Against a background of rising fuel costs, the credit squeeze and the weakening dollar, handheld offers a more flexible and cost-effective way of putting IFE into the aircraft,” he says. “At the same time, many more airlines – low-fare operators, even regional carriers - feel the need for IFE, whether or not they have the dollar and manpower resources. That’s where the inherently lower cost of handheld can help.”

Gray is convinced that handheld has now established itself as an accepted part of the cabin service armoury. “The fact that the likes of American, Northwest and US Airways are building portables into the cabin shows that this solution is not ephemeral but an ongoing part of IFE,” he insists. “What’s more, handhelds have now been around for long enough to prove that passengers like them, and that they tend to be much easier to keep serviceable than embedded systems.”

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