The new business class seats will be retrofit into the carrier’s 777-200ER aircraft and into a portion of their 767-300ER aircraft. The 767-300s which are not reconfigured will be retired from the fleet.

The carrier has also indicated that their Main Cabin Extra configuration, offering an additional 4-6″ of legroom, will be part of the redesign on the 763s and 772s. On the 772s there will be 5 rows of these seats, 45 of the 215 total economy seats. On the 763s there will be only two rows of Main Cabin Extra, 14 of the 181 total economy seats. Customers holding elite status in the AAdvantage program, as well as with oneworld partners, will have access to the MCE seats.

The new cabin configuration will also include major upgrades to the in-flight entertainment systems and in-flight connectivity options. The IFE system for the 772s has impressive spec’s. It will have roughly 700 hours of audio and video available, up to 120 movies, 180 TV programs, 350 audio selections and 30 games. In business class the screens will be 15.4″ while economy will have quite generous 9″ screens. All seats on the 772s will have 110V outlets and USB plugs as well.

UPDATE: AA has confirmed that the regular main cabin seats will be 3-4-3 on both the 777-200 and 777-300ERs, and without any extra pitch. That’s going to be quite tight.

The satellite-based WiFi service will allow for global connectivity for customers. That said, no vendor has been chosen for the implementation yet so there is plenty of time for the company to see how the various options in the market shake out in the coming months, particularly as others add similar service, to pick the correct product for their fleet.

The 763 refits will not include the new IFE systems; the company will continue to rely on personal tablets for business class passengers on those aircraft for the IFE systems. The 763s will also not receive the WiFi connectivity. Combine that with the very limited MCE seating and those might just become the aircraft to avoid in the American long-haul fleet.

I’ve read through the release now a few times, looking for some hint of a magic paragraph previously missed which makes the planned upgrades tremendous. I still cannot find it. The release has many exciting phrases like “among the first in the industry” and “Business Class suite.” These plans, unfortunately, seem to be mostly playing catch-up to the rest of the industry. The “new” business class seats are based on the same product that US Airways just completed deployment of on their A330 fleet. The IFE upgrades are great, assuming you’re on the 77s; the 763s, not so much. And the seating density of the new seats raises a few red flags.

Type for type, United will offer more premium cabin seats (admittedly not all with direct aisle access) and more economy seats with increased legroom., along with a comparable IFE and connectivity scheme. And United is rolling out the seating and IFE config this year, not starting in 18 months. Delta is similarly ahead of American in the offering, both in terms of timing and product.

I have to give AA credit for trying to build a buzz about the announcements. The press conference included a number of bloggers and other social media folks, trying to tap in to the newer venues for sharing such announcements. And the bit I managed to catch on Twitter suggests that it has worked in come circles. Still, the implementation of these changes are 20 months off. It is going to be hard to keep the buzz alive that long.

There is no doubt that it is increasingly difficult to both offer a top-notch product and to do so in a manner that allows a company to remain competitive in the ever-changing market. In this case, however, it seems that American is barely even able to play catch-up, much less leap ahead. And if this is supposed to revitalize the company, inspiring creditors to ride out the bankruptcy and see a strong future for the carrier I’m very concerned about their strategy. The phrase “too little, too late” comes to mind.

For a different, and somewhat more positive, take on the new seats check out Gary’s post here; he was at the event where they were unveiled.

Related Posts

• US Airways reaches labor agreement…with American Airlines’ unions
• A different take on the new American Airlines 777-300ER interior
• An interesting view on bAAnkruptcy from the NY Times
• Unions grab a stronghold in American restructuring
• Some more thoughts on today’s bAAnkruptcy filing
• Here comes bAAnkruptcy for AMR/American Airlines; operations to be unaffected

“In many ways, Gogo has continued to expand its Air-to-Ground network and will soon launch ATG-4, which is expected to significantly improve capacity,” said Gogo’s president and CEO Michael Small. “Acquiring the 1 MHz spectrum license from LiveTV will play an integral role in our continued expansion activities and help us deliver a performance boost for end users.”

Even though this will essentially consolidate the entirety of the spectrum used for Air-to-Ground services into a single company, it seems that allowing this to proceed is still the best option for consumers. There are other competitors – via satellite – also in the space so the theoretical monopoly doesn’t really exist. And that is the only justifiable explanation I can see for the FCC to consider blocking the move.

The biggest surprise, in many ways, is that the deal took this long to reach. LiveTV is still supporting the old Airfone network and customers in a limited manner so there is some income associated with that network. Still, the JetBlue subsidiary has long ago given up expanding the use of that spectrum. In other words, it is sitting largely idle and adding minimal value to the company and to the traveling public. Then again, with only one suitable customer for the spectrum purchase, I can understand taking a bit of time to negotiate a good deal.

Related Posts

• Interesting uptake numbers from gogo
• A step closer to more bandwidth in the skies
• End of the line for Kiteline

Most of the improvements have come to the fare data searches. The data is now sortable on all columns, loads much faster and allows for much faster correlation of the information at hand. The other important aspect of these changes is that they allow me to more quickly add additional types of fare data to the site as I come up with more fun stuff to share.

Here’s what the new interface looks like:

Clicking on any of the column headers will sort the data (though I don’t really know why you’d want to sort on fare basis!?!) and you can page through the data using the controls at the bottom of the dialog.

I’m working on bringing back the flight search functionality that ITA killed off in December, getting fare validity details into the displays and I’ve got a few other ideas percolating about as well. If there’s something in particular you’d like to see added to the suite just holler. If I can find the data there is a pretty good chance I’ll build it.

Finally, I’ve removed the registration requirement from many of the tools on the site. Turns out that I thought it was cool to have at one point but I never actually did much with the registrations so there isn’t much point in walling off the data that way. You’ll still need to register for the automated fare/inventory alerts (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to send the alert emails) but most of the data should be wide open. If there’s something that isn’t that you’d like to see drop me a line.

Overall the website changes appear to be mostly aesthetic, which is fine. Unfortunately, however, they managed to leave the one bit of the old site that is pretty awful on the old platform. The online check-in process is still the same flash-based mess that it has been since the Sabre migration happened. That was the one bit that really needed help and it didn’t get any. There are other bits of the site, like the airport guides, that have a rather unfinished feel to them. Hopefully those get touched up soon enough.

The mobile app, on the other hand, is a pretty solid offering overall, particularly for a v1.0 product. It offers flight booking, management, tracking and check-in functionality, all the basics that a mobile app should have to be useful. But it also has more.

The flight booking option is a slightly different interface than the other mobile apps I’ve seen, most notably in the seat selection, which comes on a scroll wheel rather than a seat map picker. I’m not sure if it is good or bad, but it is definitely different. It can also use geolocation to display default departure airports based on where you are, which is a neat feature, though not necessarily incredibly valuable.

There are some bugs in the flight booking interface still (remember, it is a v1.0 product), so scrolling down to the bottom of the page can result in seeing things like all the error messages that might be displayed if something goes wrong, but that doesn’t seem to interfere with the actual functionality so not a huge problem. I expect that those will be cleaned up soon enough.

The in-flight entertainment guide is pretty basic, but it includes a list of the DirecTV channels available and the movies showing, along with reviews. The in-flight section also has details on the food and snack options, including wine pairing suggestions such as Sauvignon Blanc with Terra Blue chips (apparently the citrus finish is great with the salty chips).

The highlight of the app, to me, is the "My trips" section. The display of upcoming trips is intuitive and offers up all the appropriate information on a single screen. The online check-in, social media share (Twitter and FaceBook) and "Pick me up" email features are also very nice. The flight review bits on the mobile app are arguably better than those on the main website.

And, there is more available via the trip interface. Tap on the city and you get access to the City Guide section of the app. In addition to airport information the City Guide includes tips on sights, dining and activities in the destination cities. Strangely, I cannot find any way to access that information other than via a scheduled trip, but it is nice to see that the company is working on making that happen. Hopefully they can add more content (it is somewhat sparse right now) and they expose it more directly in the near future. It would also be nice to see this content make it into the main website; it does not appear to be there right now.

Speaking of things that I hope to see in the future, there is a section in the flight booking portion of the site, both on the main website and the iPhone app, called "Add extras." Currently that section only says, "The flights you have selected don’t offer any upgrades," so there is nothing that can be selected but it certainly opens up a number of possibilities for things that might be coming. This is separate from the Even More Space seating option, though that might be something that is listed here. But there could be other things as well. This is definitely an interesting revelation that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Overall the app is a much bigger leap forward than the website updates. Both are nice, but the app is very impressive, particularly in the my trips section. Hopefully the Android app which is expected soon will be similarly functional and both will continue to improve, fixing the little bugs that are showing today.

OK, not really all of it. Actually a very limited subset of it, but that’s per my choice. When they announced the plan Emirates suggested that they had a rate plan in mind that would allow customers to readily use the system for a flight to London at a very reasonable price point. When I logged on to the system these were the pricing options I was given:

The numbers are reasonable, I suppose, given the costs of providing the service. And metering the bandwidth will certainly help keep the speeds reasonable for the folks who are willing to pay to use it. The problem is that it also really limits the things that can be done in-flight. At least without paying the running overage rate. At least the sign-up process gives you the option of having the system stop at 25MB rather than just keep running (though that is an option as well). And they give you a running tally of your consumption.

The system also does some other cool things, like incredibly heavy JPEG compression on the terrestrial gateway to keep image sizes down. Still, I logged on and, before I had actually launched any apps or loaded any web pages my computer had managed to slurp up 2.2MB of data. Sure, that’s something going on with my computer (I should probably figure out what) but had I purchased the lower tiered product I’d be nearly half done.

I can check emails, but running an RDP/Citrix session to do real work would be quite bandwidth intensive. And I find myself limiting the sites I’m willing to visit, trying to save my bytes to make them last through the flight. Like I said, I cannot say that I blame them, but it is a bit frustrating to have the product price be so potentially high. I’d love to update the Travel Tools site or check on a few clients I’ve been neglecting over the past two weeks during my travels. And I’d rather do it now than in the lounge when I’ll be enjoying the spa treatment or spending the time with my wife. Alas, my expense account doesn’t run that deep.

The performance is decent enough. Most webpages are loading at somewhere around 3G speeds I’d say. A bit of latency, but it isn’t all that horrible. The jitter is pretty wild though.

Overall I’d say that the service lives up to expectations for a basic connectivity system. At this price point I’m not really in a financial position to give it a true workout doing real work, but it certainly is effective for the basic stuff. And if you can keep your data consumption below 25MB (which is harder than it sounds), the price for international travel, considering the systems that are involved, is actually pretty darn good.

A quick bit of analysis from APEXMary and NYCAviation suggests that the uptake rate is <5%. Yikes!

To be fair, there are plenty of aircraft operating on routes that are simply too short for there to be any reasonable demand. That isn’t going to help the uptake numbers at all. But they’re quite proud of the number of planes with the system installed so they need to account for that. And the cost to equip the smaller planes is not likely particularly cheaper than the cost for the big planes. And they’ve got most of their airline partners locked in to 10 year contracts, to there is plenty of time to continue growing the revenue.

Another interesting number is that they are realizing about $0.41 per passenger. The good news is that this number is a huge increase over the $0.26/passenger for the same period the previous year.

Also interesting is that about half of their revenue (though mostly on the equipment side, not the services side) is from business aviation. And that side of the business realizes about $1,800/month in revenue per aircraft.

The company has grand plans and a pretty solid technology path for going forward. But it remains to be seen if they can keep the growth up long enough to actually become profitable. Raising $100MM from the IPO will certainly help extend the timeline to realize such, but the new technology implementations are going to be capital intensive again so that will likely be a challenge to those numbers.

Plenty of interesting data to mull over this holiday season.

First up it was FareCompare changing the way they display data. Most notable there is that they removed the "Flyertalk’ search engine from the site. That engine was great for listing all the fares from a particular departure point, filtered by carrier, alliance, destination region and other factors. The reason provided for the change was a massive back-end upgrade to comply with new fare/fee disclosure rules coming soon, theoretically a positive change for consumers. But that doesn’t change the fact that the short-term impact is quite negative.

Next up, ITA Software, now a subsidiary of Google, finally pulled the plug on the original Matrix search engine. The old matrix was simple, lightweight and speedy. The new one is none of those things. Yes, the new Matrix still can do most of the same searches that the old one could. But none of them are as fast and none are as easy, either to enter or to browse the results on. Combine that with the search results taking noticeably longer to be returned and that’s another major downgrade for customers. The old matrix was used in many of the Travel Tools site resources and I’ll be working on porting that content to the new matrix as I find time.

Strike three came this morning when Travelocity pulled the plug on their flexible fare search engine. This was a great tool for listing all the published fares in a market, reading fare rules and otherwise comparing the fare you were seeing against what could possibly be offered. Now it is dead. This also happens to be the underlying source for the Travel Tools Flexible Fare Search and SWUable Fare Search tools; both are offline right now as a result of this change and, again, I hope to have both back online soon.

Three major blows against the traveling public, all the week before Christmas. Happy holidays, indeed.

This is a similar system to that which Emirates will be using on their A380 fleet as announced earlier this week. It will also allow Qantas to remain competitive with United Airlines, which has announced intentions to outfit its entire fleet with WiFi, including the 747s they are flying to Australia.

No word on pricing yet, and the trial in February is for "business and first class passengers" according to one report, though I don’t know how they’ll keep the WiFi signal only on the upper deck. More details as they come out.

Related Posts:

• Emirates launches in-flight WiFi on A380s
• Fleet-wide wifi coming to United

The price-point for the service ranges from ~$7.50-$15, depending on the device type and amount of data consumed. They expect that the plans will more than meet the needs of their users based on testing they have performed over the past several months. The prices are lower than what Lufthansa charges for their services across the Atlantic so that should help with customer adoption.

Hopefully the A380 I’m flying in January is one of the 11 with the service active. I’d love to give it a try at that price point.

More from Emirates on the announcement here.

Yes, this price is a discount from the cost of buying the service on a month-to-month basis. But only $20, or less than 5% savings. Take a month off – like maybe a vacation or something where you leave the country – and you’re actually paying more for the internet under the yearly plan. Ouch.

I get the idea of bundling up products and offering bulk discounts. I think that, when done right, they are a great way to increase sales for a product. But I also see very little value in paying such a high rate in advance, especially when the chances to realize the value of the discount are potentially limited. Too much risk and not enough potential savings.

Then again, my travel patterns are sporadic enough that committing to something on the same carrier for an entire year is never a good idea. Even my status earning comes from many partner flights. I suppose if you really are stuck on the same carrier every trip of every month (and that carrier happens to be Delta) it might not be so horrible. But still some real risk there.