Time to dive into the headlines of the year, as well as trends. Welcome to part one of Review 2023.
- Part 1: Thinner seats, more passengers and more aircraft
- Part 2: Some Passenger Experience Thoughts about the year
- Part 3: My Year in Numbers
New aircraft orders continue to flow
It’s been a busy year, with ATR Aircraft, Airbus, Boeing and Embraer all seeing upticks in orders, gaining big orders through the year during Paris and Dubai Air Shows, as well as big announcements through the year.
There’s been big movement from the Indian carriers, with Air India and Indigo placing massive orders. Meanwhile, Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa and others have added to the numbers, as well others adding to the great mix.
The challenge for the aircraft OEMS will be simple – keeping up with production, whilst seeing how to expand.
That could be the real challenge for 2024, even as Airbus activates its new assembly line.
Sustainable Air Fuel. So Few Drops – So little progress on production.
We’ve had a lot of demonstration flights this year, with both Emirates and Virgin Atlantic demonstrating 100% SAF-fueled flights in at least one engine. Even the engine manufacturers have gone on to accredit SAF for their engines.
As I’ve gone on (and at length), the supply of sustainable air fuel is… unimpressive. The next few years are going to have to be a massive scale-up of SAF production, as well as the alternatives.
With the lobbying efforts, as well as both public and private commitments, hopefully, we can start this needle to shift where SAF supplies can meet the deadlines of 2030 and then net-zero targets of 2050.
With Electric flight and Hydrogen flight still very much in their infant stages, efforts for now will have to focus on burning fuel to power an engine turbine.
And it is going to take two things governments, populations and companies hate – money and time.
I’ll refer you to this great documentary by WSJ on United Airlines’ efforts that gives a glimpse of some of the mountains to be climbed.
Yes, the seats are thinner. And they’re only going in one direction.
Reducing weight in seats is… an obsession of all seat manufacturers. One of the places where dead weight exists on an aircraft is the seats, lighter seats are the order of the day – be it the structures, fillings and covers.
Acro Seats Series 9 – Coming to Jet2
Collins Aerospace Aurora.
Expliseat TiSeat E2 (to be seen on Jazeera Airways Airbus A320neo family aircraft)
With concepts showing a lot more for the future.
Stelia Aerospace low-weight business Class concept seat as exhibited at AIX 2023
You can bet in 2024 that seat manufacturers will be looking to shave every gram off a seat they can, as well as improve the recyclability of such seats.
Apart from glue – that stuff is nearly impossible to recycle.
Redeployment will continue
Closure of Airspaces, as well as airlines choosing not to serve high-risk areas, have continued, with Russian airspaces closed to a lot of airlines still, as well as airlines unwilling to serve Israel.
As such, airlines last year creatively continued to redeploy aircraft. Expect leases to continue and some odd equipment deployments until things settle down a little.
IFE – Pretty screens, but need to be matched by content
Pansonic’s Astrova continues to make big strides in the market, whilst Thales continues to push its Optiq products out, backed with Servers to support it.
Panasonic Astrova at the United Airlines signing event
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Thales Avant Up with Optiq displays
These are wonderful, but pushing 4K content to the seat continues to be a major issue – and licencing seems to be a black art.
Perfect Example – we’ve all been on an aircraft and we’ve found a TV Series we like (Let’s say Star Trek: Strange New Worlds or The Big Bang Theory).
And all you can find are three or four episodes…and not of the greatest quality.
As passengers like to “binge watch” content, it would be nice to see the entire series loaded onto IFE systems. And ideally, on something modern, as storage is cheap.
Steeaming media continues to be a core seller, with airlines flocking to Bluebox Aviation and AirFi competing hard for customers.
Air4All Comes out of the shadows
We’ve been keeping more than a close eye on what the Air4All group has been working on – and the first fruits of the programme have come out, in collaboration with Delta Flight Products – the ability to place a powered wheelchair in-situ in an aircraft, without it going in the hold and risking damage.
We have an extensive article on this, and why I still think it is one of the innovations of the year.
LEO connectivity shows its potential.
One of the best demonstrations I had at Aircraft Interiors Expo was Hughes – demonstrating their collaboration with OneWeb with a Low-Earth Orbit connectivity solution, being able to deliver 150 MB to an iPhone 14 Pro on the ground via electronically steerable antenna, modem and router.
This is growing with SpaceX’s Starlink platform, which airlines have been signing up to for Gate-t0-Gate connectivity.
There’s a lot more to expect from LEO connectivity in 2024.
Connectivity on the smaller aircraft
We focus a lot on delivering and connecting the larger aircraft – but this year has as also seen Hughes and Intelsat looking to equip the regional fleets of Delta and American Airlines respectively.
I hope we see more of this in 2024, with other airlines able to piggyback off these deals, with a lot of the dirty design work done, and Satcom vendors able to ship it as a certified kit.
People will continue to be stupid on planes
Be it acts of Air Range, Terminal Rage, being enabled by anger, alcohol or entitlement, we’re going to see people continue to be stupid in the air.
Economy Class and Beyond is going to do the thing we do best with these things – report on attempts to stem the stupidity. As for reports of the actions of such people, We will continue not to waste even opening a web page, or providing one character in their actions, defence or attack.
Please – be it the terminal or in the air, please be kind to one another. And whilst if you enjoy a drink in the airport, please enjoy responsibly.
Airlines will have to invest in passenger experience – whether they like it or not
Airlines are mostly over the COVID hump, but some airlines have held back or cut back on passenger experience – either dressing up as a sustainability move or outright admitting it.
With more of the world continuing to be moving in 2024, as we hopefully see the Asian bounce finally kick into high gear, airlines won’t be able to hide behind excuses and will have to innovate
Don’t get me wrong – the sustainability agenda won’t be far from anyone’s lips in 2024 – however, balancing that against the passenger experience agenda will be a hard act
And airlines will get this wrong, going too far one way or another.
The balance will come – but a lot of airlines are going to be stumbling through this over the next year.
Tomorrow
In tomorrow’s post, we’re going to dive into some of the passenger experiences I have encountered over the year and try to pull some themes out of it.
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Do you think that if someone abducted a few of the engineers who design the awful slimline seats and forced them to sit in their own product for hours until they begged for the suffering to end, the seat manufacturers might see sense and stop making every generation of seats worse than the prior one?