Celebrating 100 years of service, Delta Air Lines is not resting on its laurels when it comes to elevating the passenger experience across touchpoints including aboard its aircraft.
From a new Delta Concierge AI assistant that will help ‘Fly Delta’ app users optimize and personalize their journeys to new content and travel partners in the form of YouTube and Uber, respectively, the US major is focused on people, both its team members and customers, Delta managing director inflight entertainment and connectivity Glenn Latta said at the SATELLITE 2025 conference and exhibition in Washington D.C.
As ever, offering advanced inflight entertainment and connectivity is a core part of Delta’s elevated passenger experience. The carrier has no fewer than 165,000 IFE screens in its fleet, and now flies 888 aircraft with Viasat’s Ka-band geostationary (GEO) satellite-based IFC solution in support of free Wi-Fi as part of the Delta Sync ecosystem.
But Delta is also now moving forward with the integration of its IFE and connectivity, in a bid to transform those displays into smart screens that leverage personalization. Viasat is a key partner in that integration project, but now so too is Hughes, which is bringing its groundbreaking Hughes Fusion IFC product to the carrier’s IFE-fitted Boeing 717 aircraft later this year, plus select future new-delivery Airbus A350-1000s and A321neos.
Fusion is a LEO/GEO multi-orbit, multi-network, multi-band, multi-beam hybrid which features two antennas, a ThinKom Solutions VICTS antenna for Ka-band GEO service plus a Hughes LEO-only electronically steered antenna to support Eutelsat OneWeb’s Ku-band LEO service.
Describing Delta’s unique vision for “multi-orbit” IFC and why Hughes Fusion is a differentiator, Latta said during Hughes’ Global Business Update at SATELLITE 2025: “When we think of multi-orbit, you know, I’ll make an analogy with automobiles… Some of us have a front-wheel drive car, right? And so the front-wheel drive car is more economical, better in the snow, more simple. But some of us have a rear-wheel drive car, right? Better balance, better acceleration, better on the track, better for towing.
“So when we think of multi-orbit, [it’s] selectable. I can select front-wheel drive and I’ve got some some good characteristics there. I can select rear-wheel drive; I’ve got some good characteristics there. But if multi-orbit is selectable, you’re giving up and trading off something relative to delivering a great experience.
So my analogy for Hughes Fusion is they’re giving us all-wheel drive all the time.
So we’re able to pull from each orbit what we need in order to optimize and deliver that elevated experience to our customers without compromise.
We’re not giving up something to do that. We’re actually pulling from all of those assets simultaneously. And by doing that we also have resiliency. So if there is an issue or anomaly on one network, we can pull from the other network and deliver for that always available customer experience.
Reza Rasoulian, who serves as senior vice president of the Aviation Business Unit at Hughes, said Latta’s analogy was “actually perfect. Why compromise when we’re trying to deliver a fantastic passenger experience?”
It is not immediately clear if the new-delivery Delta A350s and A321neos will enter post-delivery retrofit modifications at Delta TechOps for the Hughes Fusion installations, but it seems likely given that Delta once took the same approach when installing the Intelsat (formerly Gogo) 2Ku IFC system on its A350s (before the system was linefit offerable at Airbus).
For Delta’s regional aircraft, which do not carry seatback IFE, management had very significant weight requirements. “So, it was to deliver the same streaming class experience, but to do it at a much lower weight,” said Latta. The high-capacity Hughes Inflight GEO solution uses ThinKom’s smaller, lighter Ka1717 VICTS hardware.
Delta started the process with an RFP in 2022. “And we have a very extensive validation process for any new technology that goes on the plane because what we don’t want to do is put a technology on the aircraft that we have to ultimately retrofit prematurely,” said Latta.
“We need a seven- to 10-year CapEx cycle for that technology. So we actually flew this technology on a Delta aircraft [a CRJ200], I believe in 2023 to validate the technology to then work together with Hughes on the aircraft integration and certification process.”
Crucially, the Delta executive stressed that both firms are in “complete alignment on how we measure success both in terms of metrics, quality of experience, brand loyalty for both of us and delivering that exceptional experience.”
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