The growth in use and the influence of social media on the aviation industry over the past couple of years has been phenomenal and we have now even reached the stage of an aircraft being christened after a Twitter hashtag. US low-fare carrier Virgin America has named one of its Airbus A320s #nerdbird and the aircraft is to be the platform for a significant development with its In-Flight Entertainment offering.
This week at the 2011 Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) Expo in Seattle, the airline announced the selection of Lufthansa Systems’ BoardConnect platform, as the technology partner for the hotly anticipated next iteration of the airline’s Red in-flight entertainment system. Slated for launch next year and now under development, the new Red platform will offer an entirely new approach to in-flight entertainment, with hybrid technology that will give travellers a variety of ways to play, interact, connect and be entertained at 35,000ft– similar to the multi-faceted consumer technologies they have access to in their lives on the ground.
BoardConnect is a cost-efficient, easy-to-install system which replaces complex legacy in-flight entertainment solutions via an onboard WiFi network. It will allow Virgin America to build a next iteration of Red that offers a larger, high-definition touch-screen seatback monitor with full WiFi connectivity and a breadth of curated content, along with the ability for flyers to use their own personal electronic devices to connect to the system pre-flight, in-flight and post-flight.
Although back-end testing of the new system by the technical experts at Virgin America and Lufthansa Systems is already underway on #nerdbird, the airline plans to roll out the new Red platform for guests starting in late 2012. 
“The idea behind Red has always been to reinvent the flight experience, by offering travelers more options, more control, more content and more interactivity. Even though we believe that Red has raised the bar and is still head and shoulders above anything else in the U.S. skies, we’re not the kind of Company that rests on our laurels,” said David Cush, President and CEO, Virgin America. “Our focus on innovation is a core part of our business model and guest offering, and BoardConnect will allow us to not only leap even further ahead of the airline pack, but also pace the larger consumer trends in mobile technology. We now have the architecture we need to design a dynamic entertainment experience that is the next logical iteration of Red.”
Most current IFE solutions are complex and hard-wired, making them expensive to purchase and install, difficult to maintain and often inflexible in use. Instead of connecting every single seat to the content server through several miles of cables, BoardConnect requires just a few access points.
“Our travellers want connectivity yes, but they also want access to more media content and services that will improve their trip. We were the first airline to offer WiFi fleetwide as of May 2009, yet we’ve seen use of Red only grow since then. We want to give our travellers more options instead of fewer, including the ability to multi-task across platforms – just as they do in their lives on the ground. Offering both connectivity to personal devices and accessible dynamic content will allow us to deliver the best of both worlds,” added Cush.
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