Flyht and BoeingI wish we knew more about what Flyht and Boeing are up to together. With the Inmarsat situation one can parse the news releases and articles and read the Inmarsat white paper on swiftbroadband-safety and get a good Idea of what's going on but with the Boeing situation only secrecy. We were expecting an announcement about a year ago and thought it would be something similar to the Airbus situation where AFIRS is cetified as a satcom solution on Airbus planes and available as an optional line-fit. But its clear that it is something more complex than this.
A Cobham spoesman recently stated that Boeing is insisting on a duel satcom option:
“Boeing indicated they want our product but the redesign [for Airbus] put such pressure on the schedule for 777X [terminal development] that we had to agree to part ways on that one,” according to Kasselman. He explains that the work would have entailed offering both Iridium and SB-S on the 777X. “They want two satcom systems on the aircraft that are not similar so that they have redundancy if one satcom system fails. And the reason they want that is the polar coverage Iridium [provides]. And they expect to get permission from ICAO to reduce the number of [HF] radios” which are notoriously slow, but work as a back-up. This would drive weight savings as well.
And now Mr. Schmutz has indicated that AFIRS has been enhanced to be compatible with both major satellite systems. From Flyht's news release about the Boeing testing:
FLYHT will provide equipment, software, a Supplemental Type Certificate and support to Boeing for this evaluation. This program will test many features including enhancements to AFIRS that will allow the product to stream flight data over different satellite systems, including Iridium and an Inmarsat SwiftBroadband connection.
Mr. Schmutz has made a few references to recent enhancements made to AFIRS. So this is obviously one but are there others as well at Boeings behest.
So will it be an enhanced AFIRS as a stand-alone system to be available on Boeing planes or will Flyht technology be incorporated into an expanded version of Boeing's Airplane Health Management system or will it be something else?
We just don't know. I hope they don't keep us waiting too long to find out.