Travel Service, the biggest airline in the Czech Republic and one of the most rapidly growing air carriers in Central Europe, has selected the latest solution from Donica and Display Interactive to equip its fleet with a wireless IFE platform.

Travel Service operates both charter and scheduled flights to leisure destinations under the brand SmartWings. The company also offers wet and dry lease services to other airlines, especially seasonal leases for Canadian operators.

The company unveiled plans to install a wireless IFE platform on its new fleet of B737 MAX. Aircraft, which will progressively enter into service starting early 2018.  The new fleet will be retrofitted with the latest hardware and software platform from Donica and Display Interactive.

 “From an engineering perspective, the new CNSU proposed by Donica was definitely an option to consider. When they mentioned the reduction of the number of LRUs and the space savings in the technical bay, they touched a soft spot” explains Stanislav Blažek, Avionics Engineer at Travel Service.“Their solution did not only make sense from a technical perspective, but also from an economical one”, confirms Ludek Stasek, Technical Director.

With Travel Service, the next-gen hardware platform designed and built by Donica has found its launch customer. The Cabin Network Service Unit (CNSU), which will be unveiled at APEX Singapore, merges a powerful media server into a single component, along with a sophisticated crew management panel, upload and update interfaces, and a dual modem for wireless communications. Billy Vauls, Director of Engineering at Donica International, goes further: “Our new wireless access points offer incomparable performance on the market today, and typically we can serve all passengers on a narrow body with just two of them, along with high-quality and no buffering. They are IEEE 802.11ac compliant and use the smart antenna technology, which is the most efficient outside a lab, thus serving passengers who have a mix of older and new devices.”

“The combination of Donica’s technologically advanced hardware with the Display Interactive software solution was really key in our decision,” mentions Jan Lukes, from Travel Service. “Display ran a live demo of their Content Management System over the cloud, just to show how simple it is to change and update everything; graphical user interface or contents and services. As a leaser, we can turn the wireless IFE to our clients’ brands in less than one hour when aircraft are on the ground, and this is highly valuable.”

The UGO solution, from Display Interactive, is used by airlines to offer their passengers a vast array of services during their flight, including the must-have DRM-protected contents, daily newspapers, moving map, and retail applications for duty-free or snacks - customized to airline processes -as well as a diversity of value-adding services which cover entertainment, information, and comfort.

Display Interactive solution had already been selected by a number of airlines, as announced prior to AIX 2016. “We are very happy to welcome Travel Service in the UGO family” mentions Thierry Carmes, Strategy and Development Director at Display. “The Travel Service team has already suggested a couple of features that we decided to include in the software. This is a great start, because we are so keen on continuous innovation in cooperation with our customers.”