REYKJAVIK — A light rain did not dampen the celebratory mood today at Icelandair’s Keflavík Airport (KEF) hub, where the carrier welcomed the first Airbus aircraft in its 87-year history, an A321LR fitted from nose to tail with Panasonic Avionics’ newest and most advanced inflight entertainment system, Astrova, and new and updated seats from Italian firm Geven.
Bearing the distinction of being the debut operator of Astrova, Icelandair’s 187-seat, two-class A321 is also equipped with Viasat’s Ka-band satellite-powered broadband inflight connectivity system, which Panasonic Avionics vice president of product & portfolio management Andrew Masson said can be easily integrated in the future with Astrova’s in-seat 4K OLED screens, as embedded IFE evolves to become a more connected experience.
Elsewhere onboard, and in a notable decision that will make life easier on cabin crew and indeed passengers, Icelandair is offering larger galleys and a more passenger-pleasing and accessible aft lavatory footprint than other operators plying longhaul routes with single-aisle aircraft.
“We are used to the Boeing 737 MAX. This is luxury,” a crew member confided to RGN onboard the A321LR.
The narrowbody (registered TF-IAA) and other A321LRs slated to enter the fleet, as well as Icelandair’s forthcoming new extra-long-range A321XLRs, will replace its aged Boeing 757 workhorses and “unleash new opportunities for our great company and for Iceland as a destination and hub between continents,” declared president and CEO Bogi Nils Bogason.
With a range of up to 4,000 nautical miles, the Pratt & Whitney GTF-powered A321LR will first serve Stockholm for Icelandair, and eventually cover the UK and the whole of its network.
At roughly 1:18pm today, members of the media including your author — who, full disclosure, traveled to KEF as a guest of the airline — witnessed the historic touchdown of the A321LR from an exhilarating vantage point, a veritable spotter’s paradise adjacent to the runway.
When the aircraft arrived at Icelandair’s hangar, the festivities began. A bevy of airline staffers, representatives from its passenger experience (PaxEx) suppliers and journalists were present to celebrate the crew who had ferried the A321LR from Airbus’ manufacturing facility in Hamburg to KEF, executing an objectively perfect touchdown in less than ideal conditions.
Entering the Icelandair A321LR, one is immediately greeted by a spectacular hero light, which RGN readers will recognize as being a signature part of Airbus’ Airspace cabin, along with the XL flip-up bins that can store 60% more luggage than the airframer’s prior pivot bins. Airbus has also gently honed the sidewalls “to give a little bit more space to the passenger sitting at the window seat,” Airbus’ marketing manager for single aisle family aircraft, Nathalie Casanova, noted to RGN today.
Icelandair has selected an understated light and dark grey palette for its ‘Saga’ premium class and economy class seats and headrest covers, though the seats down back do sport a pop of color in the form of a magenta trim.
Whilst demure, this color scheme allows the Airspace LED lighting to largely set the mood onboard.
But Astrova is also unique in that Panasonic has rather famously moved the graphics processing and central processing units that are usually found in the head impact criterion (HIC) path of IFE screens to a discrete seat box between the seat legs. The IFE giant then placed the Bluetooth and USB-C ports in a patented peripheral bar that can be easily swapped out as technology evolves.
Icelandair chief operating officer Tómas Ingason touted both the IFE system’s “unique modular architecture” which “enables future ‘on-wing’ upgrades of system computing power and memory for airlines to keep pace with fast-changing consumer electronic trends” and the swappable peripheral bar that can “enable new capabilities in Bluetooth connectivity and personal device charging standards”.
But he wasn’t alone in his praise. Geven, which itself is celebrating the debut aboard Icelandair’s A321LR of its lightweight Elemento platform in economy, and an updated Comoda recliner in Saga — featuring a wider backrest, 7” recline and a new cradle mechanism — was responsible for ensuring that the seats met the required Technical Standard Order (TSO) after the electronics were installed. And, as such, the firm worked closely with Panasonic on the IFE/seat integration projects for Icelandair.
Speaking with RGN on the sidelines of today’s event, Geven sales manager Gianluigi Mormile said the seatmaker found the lightweight, flexible Astrova OLED screens to be “HIC friendly” which in turn eased certification,
Geven and Panasonic started working on the project in July 2023 and within 12 short months, the seatmaker was able to certify the integrated IFE/seats, representing “quite a short lead time” for both Elemento and Comoda, noted Mormile.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Astrova has become the fastest-selling IFE system in Panasonic’s history, and likely in the world.
When developing the product, the industry giant focused on three basic tenets: industrial design, technology and sustainability, Masson explained to RGN.
“We really care about what it looks like. We really, really want it to look better than all the IFE systems that we have made, and our competitors have made and everyone has made because they all look a bit ‘speak and spell’ of the past.”
That’s why Panasonic adopted an ultra-thin “edge-to-edge” screen for Astrova with “featurettes” like built-in programmable lighting, he said.
Panasonic Avionics vice president of product & portfolio management Andrew Masson joined Icelandair executives on the ferry flight to KEF. Image: Panasonic Avionics.
The second tenet, technology, is represented in Astrova in multiple ways, noted Masson. “We have the OLED screen, which you know is very difficult to get right. We are very lucky that we have a huge consumer electronics business behind us that we leverage.” On the Bluetooth front, Panasonic has debuted a new system on Icelandair’s A321LR that simplifies the pairing of one’s wireless headphones to the IFE system. “I was connected the entire way from Hamburg to here,” he said.
“Then the third piece is, sustainability. And for us, that’s multifaceted,” continued the Panasonic executive, noting that the screens are 30% lighter than Panasonic’s “next-lightest IFE system, which was already quite light, and that is huge because for the airlines that represents reduced fuel, reduced CO2 emissions which is important for the consumer these days. And we use a lot of recyclable materials in the design.”
Crucially, however, Astrova’s modularity sustains the product for the long term, addressing the vexing issue of obsolescence. Masson explained:
You know, we do a lot of work with Google, with Apple. And if you take the Android operating system, every release adds like another million and a half lines of code to it. So, if you think in five years that’s like 7 to 10 million lines of code that Google have just added into their baseline OS. And we have to do the same sort of thing because we need things like security, we want to take advantage of new technologies that these guys are using, that consumers are used to on their smart TV’s etc.
So, the system being modular means we can sustain it for the longer term because our design approach is we’ve managed to put elements of the system into areas of the aircraft that are much easier to certify because they’re not in the head impact zone of the seat. So previously you’d have a screen, it would sit in front of you and you would never touch it because you don’t want to have to re-HIC the seat because that costs at least $1,000,000. And it’s really, really complicated. It’s getting harder to do because the authorities at the FAA or EASA are more and more conscious about improving safety like they should do. That’s their job. We want them to do that. But that makes our job on the IFE side and the seating guy’s jobs harder and harder and harder.
So, what we did is we were quite particular about taking some of the intelligence and putting it into an area that’s not in the head impact zone. And now that can be upgraded, which means in eight years time, if you need a new personalization feature or a new game or a new killer app that’s out there that everyone wants and they want on their platform, but it can’t run on your eight year old graphical processor or microprocessor, or we’ve got all this AI coming in, we’re doing a lot with it, as that comes more and more available and takes huge amounts of compute power, we can now upgrade that and put the latest foot forward to the airline and keep them relevant for the entire time.
Interestingly, the screen is so vibrant that Panasonic reckons it too is there for the long-haul. “It’s so good you can’t imagine it getting a whole lot better,” said Masson.
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Featured image of Astrova IFE onboard the Icelandair A321LR credited to Panasonic Avionics
