Airbus wants to take a page out of the Dr. Evil playbook and improve in-flight wifi with frickin’ laser beams.
OK, so it’s not quite to make your in-flight Fortnite dreams come true. Instead, the French aerospace company wants to use lasers to connect aircraft to geostationary satellites thousands of miles away to improve in-flight connectivity in a secure, reliable way.
The project is called UltraAir. Airbus hopes it will enable aircraft and satellites to communicate without using the radio frequency (RF) bands currently used by satellite systems. Those RF bands are becoming increasingly crowded. Instead, UltraAir will use data-encoded lasers to create faster transmission rates that have a direct line to the far-away sats.
The lasers will have the added advantage of being extremely resistant to interference and detection, which is of particular importance to the military and defense contractors. A laser has a much tighter beam than even the most directed RF products, making it nearly impossible for an adversary to intercept your data stream.
“As satellite services demand is growing, the traditional sat-com radio-frequency bands are experiencing bottlenecks,” the company announced this month.
It might not make much of a difference if anyone knows you’re streaming Bridgerton on your next flight, but Air Force One has very different security needs that UltraAir could someday fulfill. As a bonus, Airbus says, the in-flight laser terminal can be smaller and lighter than a current sat-com system, which improves fuel efficiency and reduces emissions.
The planes will communicate with the OneSat satellites to deliver fast and well encrypted information up to geostationary orbit and back. Airbus
UltraAir will also improve wifi speeds. Though the product is aimed primarily at well-heeled defense customers who really want faster and secure data on-the-go, Airbus believes it could eventually be installed on commercial aircraft as well.
So how fast could this wifi be? Airbus is promising “several gigabits-per-second while providing anti-jamming and low probability of interception.” So what does that mean in hard numbers? Well, the average download speed for in-flight wifi is around 10 megabits per second (Mbps), and it will cost you $8 an hour, which is on the low-end. Several gigabits per second is 2 to 3 gigabits per second, which is 200 or 300 Mbps download speed. That is about as fast as high-speed internet at home.
What’s next — The project is expected to undergo viability testing by the end of 2021 in lab conditions, with ground tests starting next year in Tenerife (the largest of the Canary Islands) between a ground station and a laser terminal already in orbit aboard an Alphasat satellite. The team hopes to have a demonstrator installed on an aircraft for initial flight testing by mid-2022.
The UltraAir program is a partnership between Airbus, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, and the Netherlands Space Office.
Of course, this is hardly the only new in-flight satellite connectivity being worked on. SpaceX is designing a plane-mounted version of Starlink for the US Air Force, with the company requesting permission from the FCC to begin in-flight testing on aircraft as well as moving vehicles on the ground.
