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Dear RWG (or is that now Ring Girl),
 
We are more than happy to rise to the challenge and climb into the ring - and not at all surprised to hear that our competitors are keen to learn more about AURA.

Whilst I'm not going to give away our intellectual property, I'm very happy to expand on our solution, particularly in the customers key areas of cost, weight and reliability.

Let's start with these crucial weight savings. You'll understand that we'll save the actual weight, power and cost numbers for our customers, but everyone can do the maths to quickly grasp why a system without servers, significantly reduced distribution hardware, and slimmed down in-seat weight is seen as advantageous by airlines. Aircraft flight manuals provide fuel burns figures for different weights so fuel savings are easily calculated, but remember that many airlines operate many sectors at max weights and will choose to increase their payload rather than take the fuel saving.  Either way, an investment in AURA can payback in a very short period of time.

As a guide the entire AURA system weight for a typical 300 seat economy deployment would is around 1.5kg per pax place - that's for everything - a full function IFE system including screens, mounts, cables, controllers, avionics, everything!

We are as driven about reliability as saving weight. For years now, avionics engineers have been building mission-critical systems with availability figures well in excess of the 99.999% we propose as standard. They are able to do so through the intelligent application of systems engineering disciplines. 

Recent changes in technology enable us to apply these disciplines to our architecture in a cost and weight effective manner to ensure that our reliability/maintainability and availability promises can be fulfilled. Of course components do fail over time, so AURA is designed to ensure the IFE experience isn't lost when they do. We achieve this through content storage at the seat, careful component and supplier selection, redundancy of system hardware, and easy inflight hot-swap of screen units.  Where the passenger experience, the sexy stuff, sells seats for airlines, it's ensuring the system doesn't fail which brings them back next time.

You are right that media loading is a major issue for airlines.  AURA offers a powerful yet simple content-management system using a single very large hot swap hard-drive at the cabin interface head-end, and large solid-state storage (0.5TB and up) in the seat.  It takes crew about a minute to exchange a secure content drive and start the process to seamlessly push the bulk content load to every seat. An aircraft-wide parallel load takes about 3mins/GB - and this can happen on turn around or in the background during flight. Daily or interim updates such as news or UI changes are easily managed via USB inputs or wireless groundlink.  AURA is highly secure and gained its first approval for early window content within six weeks of submitting technical papers to Hollywood.

Our other passion is to deliver a fantastic passenger experience. AURA provides the tools for airlines to completely customise their IFE system - first-run Hollywood content, gesture user interface, new apps, business productivity and travel tools, inflight shopping, meal and bar ordering, social networking and connectivity, and compatibility with carry-on smart devices. We are working closely with DELL and MICROSOFT to bring the reality of a PC-in-the-seat to air travellers very soon.

1. What does your typical system weigh, all-in including monitors, wiring, installation hardware, power supplies, etc.?

2. How, specifically, do you address media loading? This is a big cost of ownership issue that you have not addressed thus far.

3. You state, "we've added intelligent redundancy to the power and data." That's very interesting; how have you done this?

4. Describe your relationship with Dell; will they design and manufacture? provide reference design? do they cover warranty?

5. In providing a 99.999% guaranty, that's essentially saying that your system will never fail, which even you admit is not likely; what, if anything, are you excluding? for example, do you exclude in-flight replacement of monitors?

6. Please explain your formulary for your predicted savings of $200k-600K per year in fuel.

Guest blog by David Withers:

The rise of "seat-centric" inflight entertainment (IFE) systems is likely to benefit airline maintenance and engineering teams worldwide. Seat-centric systems are a significant technological advance compared to existing technology. The old solution, which accounts for about 90% of installed IFE systems (mostly on widebody fleets), relies on heavy, failure-prone servers built around ancient components - some of them still rely on Intel 386 processors, a chipset in its prime in the late 1980s!  

Seat-centric IFE systems, by contrast, put the intelligence and storage in every seat unit.  Our AURATM system, for example, is essentially a Dell PC in the seatback, with an Intel Atom processor running Windows 7, 512 GB of storage (upgradeable to 1 TB), and a touchscreen in sizes from 7" to 15" (or any larger, commercially available size; units 15" and larger include a 5" touchscreen controller adjacent to the passenger).  Instead of a server installation that weighs up to 1000 kilograms, there's a 3.5 kg. interface to the aircraft's avionics and cabin systems. Each seat unit and ancillary hardware weigh less and the system consumes far less power compared to older systems, reducing burden on electrical systems and air-conditioning packs. We estimate in a typical wide body installation, AURA would yield annual fuel savings of US$200,000 to $600,000 per aircraft, and prevent 1,850 to 5,550 metric tons of CO2  from entering the atmosphere.  A further benefit of a light weight seat-centric system is that narrow body aircraft can now offer the same IFE experience as their bigger brothers.

Seat-centric IFE systems like AURA were designed from a blank piece of paper, with significant input from aircraft interiors and avionics engineers, who provided advice in several key areas. Beyond the wise counsel to jettison the boat-anchor servers, they recommended several ways to make retrofit or line-fit installation easier and quicker.  And they insisted that the seat unit be easily upgradeable, to eliminate the need for costly recertification and prevent the classic problem of "obsolescence prior to installation".

But just (and I use the word loosely) moving the content and system intelligence to the seat isn't the whole story, because aircraft components, particularly those in the hands of passengers, will eventually fail.  So the AURA seat unit can be hot-swapped in flight, and we've added intelligent redundancy to the power and data.  Together these technologies allow us to guarantee a 99.999% IFE availability, at least two orders of magnitude better than what is fitted today. That's real availability, not dispatch reliability!

All this means seat-centric systems will require far less maintenance, in fact no maintenance at all when away from home base.  And with our 5 year exchange warranty there is no annual maintenance cost.  That is surely good news for MRO leaders who continue to be pressed to do more with fewer financial and human resources.