Earlier this week, Air India took some big steps forward in its inflight entertainment offering with them selecting Thales AVANT Up for its widebody fleet.
Thales Avant for Air India – Image, Thales
As part of the tender, Thales will upgrade and retrofit Air India’s current fleet of 40 Boeing 777s and 787s with its AVANT Up system, starting in 2024 and continuing through 2025.
Additionally, Thales will install the AVANT Up IFE System on Air India’s 11 new Airbus and Boeing aircraft with deliveries to commence in 2025.
Thales’ AVANT Up features Optiq, 4K QLED HDR displays for high-quality outputs.
The Optiq system features in-screen USB-A and USB-C high-speed charging ports and is the only display with two Bluetooth connections and built-in Wi-Fi. With Optiq passengers can pair their wireless headphones or other devices to the display while also charging their phones and laptops so they can arrive at their destination recharged and relaxed.
This is paired with 3D mapping and Thales’ Select User Interface.
In Quotes
Yannick Assouad, Executive Vice-President Avionics, Thales said
“At Thales, we are very proud to deepen our long standing partnership with Air India. We are committed to support the airline’s transformation by delivering state-of-the-art AVANT Up technologies that transcend the ordinary to offer Air India’s customers with world-class inflight experiences celebrating the vibrant culture and colours of India.”
Ashish Saraf, VP and Country Director for India, Thales.
“India is the fastest growing aviation market in the world, with huge potential for further growth. This sets the stage for airlines to elevate overall flying experience of passengers. We are pleased to support Air India in achieving the ambition of providing superior customer experience with our advanced AVANT Up inflight entertainment.”
Rajesh Dogra, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Air India.
“Air India is committed to providing a world-class travel experience to its passengers. Partnering with Thales for its top-of-the-class AVANT Up inflight entertainment systems is a step in the direction of our transformation programme. This latest inflight entertainment technology will allow us to stay at the forefront of aviation technology and will help us provide our passengers with a unique onboard entertainment system.”
AVANT Up and Optiq in real life
At Economy Class and beyond, we’ve used the AVANT Up IFE System with the Optiq screens at Aircraft Interiors Expo,
I used Optiq seatback, trying out some of the system’s features (not just the display technology), and it is pretty impressive, to put it mildly, with the displays capable of impressive resolution and delivery.
The dual-Bluetooth pairing is great for sharing content or hogging the two connections to yourself with a headset and game controller (and this was a standard Xbox controller being used in this demo).
It’s also impressively thin – reducing the weight of the system installed on the aircraft.
But the issue won’t be the technology – it will be with content.
Don’t forget the Content
We’ve all been on flights where the content is blocky or stretched, with IFE systems delivering DVD-quality content…on a good day (what could be called 480p content). On larger displays, there is some HD content – but it can be a struggle to have suppliers deliver content at the high resolutions needed to play this – as well as the storage servers on the aircraft to deliver this content.
It’ll be interesting to see how Air India addresses this with their suppliers to deliver HDR and 4K content to the seat – and what its requirements will be.
As well as the size of the storage server.
For Air India passengers, it’s going to be a giant leap forward in passenger experience in terms of visuals alone.
Lead Image: Thales
Other Images: Economy Class and Beyond at Aircraft Interiors Expo 2022, 2023. The editor was a guest of Thales at their booth at Aircraft Interiors Expo.
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