Budget airline using iPads to reduce aircraft's weight, fuel consumption and running costs
New budget airline Scoot Pte is now using iPads as its preferred choice of in-flight entertainment across its fleet. The move sees Scoot remove around two tons of old style audio video in-flight entertainment equipment from its aircraft and replace it with iPads. The change to iPads has enabled Scoot to shave up to seven percent off an average aircraft’s weight and add a further forty percent to the seating capacity. These savings reduce the aircraft's fuel consumption which obviously has a big cost saving.
Chief Executive Officer Campbell Wilson said. The savings will help Scoot, which makes its maiden flight today; cope with fuel prices that have jumped about 36 percent in two years. Fuel is “the number one worry” for any airline, as it usually accounts for at least 40 percent of costs.”
Scoot whose parent company is Singapore Airlines, will hand out iPads free to its first class customers for the duration of the flight. If you are not in first class, you will have to pay for its use. Scoot plans to charge around $22 Singapore Dollars which equate to around $17. The iPads come fully loaded with movies, music, games and TV Shows.
Scoot are certainly not the first airline to look at using iPads for in-flight entertainment. Australian Airline Qantas conducted a trial at the end of last year which saw it testing iPads as its in-flight entertainment. Qantas were looking at a more advanced system which involved a central hub of storage and the content being streamed over WiFi to each iPad.
Source: Bloomberg
UK editor at iMore, mobile technology lover and air conditioning design engineer.
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So were they using tube TVs/monitors???
have you ever picked up a box of cabling?
think of a plane that holds 200+ people and you need power cables, video cables to every headrest or to screens at the top of the plane, all the screens, audio cables to the seat, the centralized system to play the video, audio and send it to every location.
there's probably 50-100' of AV cabling per person. that's what, 10,000+ feet of cables
and all the associated hardware to secure it, shield it from other systems, etc. it's not like it goes straight there, it runs around in common paths so you don't have the perfect length to every seat which makes it longer
the weight adds up quickly.
oh, and you have to take up valuable space with all that you could run other equipment lines for more advanced instruments, replace the weight with fuel, etc.