FlightPath3D will have two more airlines flying this summer with its accessibility map after debuting the product on Delta Air Lines.
“Our accessibility map is a good example,” said Duncan Jackson, president of FligthPath3D at AIX. He was speaking after the company won an Onboard Hospitality Award for accessibility.
”Since last year it’s now flying on 604 Delta Air Lines aircraft, and we’ve been selected for other airlines, two of which will have it by the summer. One is a European carrier, which is huge, and one is ‘down under’, namely Air New Zealand,” Jackson reveals.
“To be approved by Delta’s disability board, we took the product there and had a mixed group of people with cognitive, physical, and eyesight-related challenges and they all used it. We made some adjustments based on their feedback and that’s why it’s now flying on all those aircraft.”
Jackson adds: ”We’re still trying to provide maps for every traveller. It’s indoctrinated in our mission that we need to be doing maps for youth, maps for any device, maps for any ability”!.
He is particularly enthusiastic about the progress of its Kids Map product
“What we added is a sort of gamification,” he explains. ”There are puzzles like jigsaws on the screen. And we’ve co-branded here, working with Formia to transition between the digital and the physical, because they can put together kids boxes so you can actually have a puzzle in the box that then takes you to the seat back to complete something digitally.
“Already we’re live with Transformers, but we’re also negotiating with other well-known children’s consumer brands to create similar products.”
Returning to the goal of maps for every traveller, a new development Jackson highlights is delivering those regardless of device. “What that means is that there’s a seatback system, a mobile system and the version that gets loaded on the aircraft – for example, Southwest streams to your personal device but everything’s loaded on the aircraft server so that you don’t need internet.
“We now have a version that doesn’t need to touch the aircraft – a cloud version. So for FlightPath3D Cloud, we’re taking Flight Aware’s data for the flight information, building the livery, the aircraft, the flight plan and then we can deliver that to an airline and they can pump it into the aircraft and give access to passengers without anything touching the aircraft,” he adds.
“It gives airlines the options to put it everywhere so we can support web, mobile applications, airline applications and all the inflight options. It’s brand new and we will be announcing customers later this summer that are choosing to just stream it into the aircraft,” Jackson says.
