Donica completed the seatback/armrest Smart LCD (SLCD) installation on the prototype A330 aircraft of Air

China in January 2018 and received the PMA certificate from CAAC in March 2018.

The Cabin Pain

After spending hugely to upgrade their fleets with the traditional AVOD system, many airlines in the world

are facing the same issue – the system is old again due to the long lead time for product development and

deployment. With typical three to five years for engineering, manufacturing, certification and installation,

the technology of the AVOD has become so lagged behind the similar consumer electronics product on the

market. The outdated user experience, long technical breakdown time, high cost for repairs and increasing

demand for maintenance, become the biggest pain of the cabin. For most airlines, the available option is

either upgrading the system again or dealing with increasing customer complain, till now an alternative

option from Donica.

Innovative Solution from Donica

Over the last two decades, Donica has aimed to bring the latest electronics technology into the avionics and

IFE market at the fastest pace, including broadcast, audio/video on demand and cabin Wi-Fi system. Since

July 2017, Donica has been working with Air China to modernize the existing cabin AVOD system. After

rounds of aircraft surveys and analysis, and iterations of proposal and verification, an innovative proposal

with the new generation seatback/armrest SLCD monitors was accepted and implemented. The solution is

to provide much more advanced and flexible products, shorten the installation down time, and improve

greatly the user experience.

After the installation completed and in-flight service started in January 2018, further finetunes were taken

to continuously increase the system performance and improve user experience, including the GUI update,

video quality improvement, content enrichment, and maintenance optimization. The brand new SLCD

solution significantly changed the passenger perception over the original IFE/AVOD system.

Highlight of the Solution

• Fast replacement of the old system and installation of the new one

The seatback/armrest SLCD monitor precisely reuses the existing physical and electrical interfaces of the

original system. The complexity of the installation is much reduced to just loosening the screws, removing

the old monitor, plugging in the new SCLD and tightening the screws – and job done. All existing cables of

power, Ethernet, discrete signal and analog video are all reused.

It only took the MRO which performed the actual installation 5 minutes to replace and install each SLCD

monitor.

• High compatibility to remaining system

The old monitor was replaced by the new SCLD, without altering the remaining system and functions,

including broadcasting, cabin overhead video, announcement, and moving maps. The airline is thus able to

modernize the user-interface intensive portion of the system without spending big chuck of money to

overhaul the total system.

• High performance

The new monitor adopts the LCD with high resolution and high reliability, providing the high sensitive

captive touch screen, which greatly improve the user experience.

The Android empowered SLCD is equipped with high performance CPU and high capacity memory, which

greatly improves the performance for content distribution and content update.

• Readiness for both wired and wireless – build-in capability for future growth

The SLCD monitor supports both the traditional wired AVOD and the future-proof wireless AVOD

architecture. Once the cabin is further equipped with Wi-Fi, the SLCD will be ready to become part of the

cabin wireless IFE (W-IFE) system.

Over the last 2 months of the in-flight service, Air China has received large amount of positive passenger

feedback, confirming the immediate increase of the user experience on the in-flight entertainment. The

feasibility, reliability and affordability of the solution are clearly verified.