The inner workings of Onboard Portals

What is Wi-Fi Onboard Portal?

There you are, 10 Kilometres up in the sky, on the way to your next destination. You open your laptop, and just like that, you can watch your favourite Netflix shows or send some last-minute emails.

Internet connectivity has become important in both our professional and personal lives. That’s why Air France KLM developed the Onboard Portal. Customers can access the internet, check flight information, and buy 3rd party offers on their personal devices.

The Onboard Portal is developed in-house by a collaboration between the Aircraft IT team and the Digital team. It's a group effort: together with the ground engineering crew, Aircraft IT provides 150+ planes with onboard servers and the Digital teams configure those through Docker containers. The servers connect with various satellite providers around the globe to make sure you stay connected during your flight.

What new possibilities does the Wi-Fi Onboard Portal bring?

KLM’s in-flight Wi-Fi opens up all new possibilities for both passengers and the cabin crew. Business travellers can choose to work or relax during the flight, and transfer passengers can manage the details for their onward flight before they reach their destination. This improves the stop-over time and gives the passenger more control over their flight schedule.

With our in-flight connectivity in the 787 fleet, we also show up-to-date flight information on the in-flight entertainment screens, as well as a timeline of important moments during the flight. For example, you’ll know exactly when your next meal will be served.

Imaginein the near future, if there's a defect with a chair, they can just take a picture and send it to the maintenance crew. When the plane lands, the crew can address the problem at once.

With the connectivity, we gather additional data about the flight and the aircraft itself. We store this real-time information in our data lake, and we can use this data to discover trends and get a more accurate view of what happens with the aircraft in flight.

What is its impact on the organisation?

Our passengers visit the onboard portal over 40,000 times a day, and we have digital upgrades on the new portal and on the onboard servers for Wi-Fi connectivity every month. Flight attendants can also instantly contact the ground maintenance crew. Our engineers receive gigabytes of information on each flight, and this impacts their way of working as they’re continually investigating new ways for this kind of data to benefit KLM.

What technical challenges do you face?

With servers in all our Wi-Fi equipped planes, our portal software is genuinely up in the clouds. The Onboard Portal connects with various satellites to provide connectivity, and it's important to us that the customer experience is the same for all the providers. We made the portal as simple as possible. We hid all the complexity for the end user, and we keep improving our services. To update the software on the aircraft servers, we do OTA updates taking into consideration the various regulations of the international aviation authorities. We maintainhigh standards in our security protocols to make sure our software doesn’t interfere with mission-critical systems in the aircraft. It’s a fine line between the need for continuous deployment and the regulations in aviatronics (aviation electronics).

Why is Wi-Fi Onboard Portal such an interesting engineering initiative?

In this project, you'll work in the whole spectrum between a software developer and an architect. You get to figure out various problems. One day, you’re working on a front-end ticket in your sprint, and the next day you’re brainstorming with your colleagues about the safety of the operating systems on the servers. It all varies between the models of the aircraft. When you work on the hardware side of the portal, it’s challenging to figure out the various regulations and limitations of running software on a plane. It’s also a challenge from a hardware perspective. It is very inspiring to have two different teams working together on this project. We learn a lot from each other.

If you’re an engineer with an interest in aviatronics, you’ll find it interesting how we move towards more digital distribution and innovation in both hardware and software. We’re currently working on the Airbus 321,it’s a new platform for our in-flight connectivity and it’s a great project.

What’s the best thing about working at Air France KLM?

We use the SaFemethodology (Scaled Agile Framework) in a growing number of teams. We have our Planning and Implementation Event each quarter at a remote location. During these events, you get to talk to other teams and check out other innovative projects going on at KLM. You can always talk to your manager if you find something exciting to work on. There’s a lot of flexibility and possibilities within our organisation.

The software you build runs in the cloud. Your solutions have an impact on all our travellers, and you bring them more joy during their flight. Aircraft IT and Digital are two teams from different parts of the company, working as one.