Emirates Rings Up 100,000th Passenger In-flight

16th February, 2009 - AeroMobile, the world’s leading provider of in-flight mobile phone services, clocked up its 100,000th user yesterday (February 15) confirming a dramatic increase in calls this year.
 
The milestone was passed when a Singaporean passenger made a call from 36,000 feet during Emirates flight EK404 from Dubai to Singapore.
 
Thousands of passengers on 31 AeroMobile-equipped Emirates aircraft depart daily from Dubai to destinations across its global network. Over 350 Emirates short and long haul flights operate weekly with AeroMobile covering services to 49 countries.
 
The fast-growing popularity of the service sees typically more than 30 per cent of passengers on each flight taking advantage of the award-winning AeroMobile system.
 
With the first 50,000 users in the first nine months since the system's launch, the second 50,000 have been clocked up in less than two months.
 
AeroMobile chief executive Bjorn-Taale Sandberg said: ”As the service availability has broadened, the number of users has shot up from 10,000 a month at the end of 2008 to 25,000 a month so far this year – and it’s rising rapidly as each day goes by.
 
“The sharp increase is not due only to the wider availability as our system is rolled out across the Emirates fleet, but the acceptance from passengers of what a valuable and stable service it is.”
 
Following a successful launch with Emirates in March 2008 – a world first – AeroMobile-equipped aircraft have seen over 370,000 flight hours of operation. Emirates Engineering is now rapidly rolling the system out across the remainder of the Airbus and Boeing fleets. AeroMobile is presently operating on Emirates A340, A330 and B777 aircraft. 
 
Patrick Brannelly, Emirates’ Vice President, Passenger Communications and Visual Services, said: “The AeroMobile facility is growing in popularity day by day. The feedback has been excellent, and our passengers are clearly using the system to stay in touch, as we saw with big increases in the number of calls and SMS messages over special occasions such as the New Year period and Valentines. We even saw a surge at the time of the result of the US presidential election.
 
“For many of our passengers, making a call on their own mobile phone during a flight has become as natural as watching their in-flight TV screens, which offer a choice of up to 1200 channels of entertainment.”
 
Usage data from actual flights shows that at peak times, in excess of 100 passengers are switching on their mobile phones during a flight.
 
Later this year, the AeroMobile system on Emirates aircraft will be upgraded to offer GPRS services. This will enable passengers to send and receive e-mails via devices such as BlackBerry's and laptops with GPRS data cards.
 
- Ends -
 
Notes to Editors
 
AeroMobile Limited is a UK-based company owned by ARINC Inc and Telenor ASA. It has been pursuing the objective of allowing the safe use of passengers own mobile phones and PDAs since 2003 in response to market demands.
 
In September 2008, AeroMobile won the “Best Achievement in Technology 2008” award from the World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA).
 
Prior to the launch of the Emirates service, mobile phone use in aircraft has only been allowed in limited, short-term trials which did not support voice calls.
 
AeroMobile is the first in-flight mobile technology to be commercially available and first flew in June 2005 on Boeing’s 777-200LR ‘Worldliner’ demonstrator aircraft.  In April 2007, AeroMobile implemented a trial service on domestic flights within Australia. This evaluation project, supporting GSM text messaging and GPRS data services, continued until January 2008 having operated on over 1,000 flights.
 
AeroMobile is teamed with Panasonic Avionics Corporation, the Panasonic’s market-leading in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems provider, to offer the AeroMobile aircraft technology under the eXPhone brand as an integral part of Panasonic’s IFE systems. The AeroMobile system uses the existing Inmarsat satellite communications systems installed on all Emirates aircraft. These systems will be upgraded at the earliest opportunity to Inmarsat's latest SwiftBroadband service providing further features and capabilities such as GPRS mobile data services
 
More information may be found at www.aeromobile.net
 
 
For more information contact:
Steve Double or Charlie Hampton
at Bell Pottinger Business & Brand
Telephone: 020 7861 2449/2431
E-Mail: champton@bell-pottinger.co.uk