Viasat is remaining cautious when discussing the impact of United Airlines’ decision to migrate to SpaceX Starlink inflight connectivity, but says it continues to grow its aircraft in service.
During the firm’s FY2025 Q2 earnings conference call, multiple analysts sought to draw out CEO Mark Dankberg on the scope of Viasat’s exposure given that United appears poised to make a fast pivot to Starlink (starting in 2025) with the intent to power free Wi-Fi for passengers. Viasat is among a cluster of IFC providers at United; Panasonic Avionics and Intelsat (formerly Gogo) also power certain subfleets.
“We would refer people to United for their plans on deploying Starlink. They have said they’re going to go through an evaluation process to get there. It would be inappropriate for us to comment on that. We are continuing to grow airplanes in service,” said Dankberg.
He continued:
We had previously given a target of about 4,200 commercial aircraft in service at the end of this fiscal year. It will be very close now; we had substantial margin before but given the ongoing delivery delays compounded by the [previous Boeing] strike, it’s going to be close but we think we’re going to be there. We have about 1500-ish planes in backlog beyond that. So, we’re going to continue to grow.
We have factored in inputs from United into our forecast, but it would be inappropriate for us to describe what that is for us. But we see ongoing growth [in IFC] at a good clip for the next several years.
As reported by RGN, Dankberg also confirmed on the call that Viasat is in “advanced discussions with Telesat to buy Ka-band LEO” capacity with the aim of augmenting/leveraging its own GEO fleet in aero (as it has done in its Inmarsat Maritime business with Eutelsat OneWeb LEO).
At the APEX Global Expo in Long Beach, Runway Girl Network asked Viasat vice president commercial mobility Don Buchman if the satellite operator and aero ISP will be ‘leading with GEO’ when it rolls out multi-orbit GEO/LEO IFC (Panasonic Avionics, for instance, says it’s ‘leading with LEO’ for its LEO/GEO offering).
Buchman said: “We’re leading with experience. It’s the experience, right?”
He said the firm is “going to use whichever one is going to serve the passenger and the service needs the best way. And we do believe it’s a combination.”
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