TV Gets Its Wings

TUSTIN — Executives at auto parts giant Tenneco Inc. can keep office televisions tuned to the increasingly popular business programming carried by cable TV channels like CNN, CNBC and MSNBC.

But when they travel in Tenneco’s business jet, they are forced to cut the umbilical that keeps them current with financial events.

That’s about to change as Airshow, a Tustin company, launches the first system for broadcasting television programs in business jets.

The new system will allow passengers on Tenneco’s Gulfstream jet to get their daily dose of the tube without worrying about changing time zones, shifting frequencies or any of the other problems that used to keep television out of the air.

Houston-based Tenneco is spending nearly $200,000 to have the system installed, but spokesman Mike Bazinet said the cost is worth it. “We want to give our executives as much information in their airborne office as they would get on the ground,” he said.

As to whether on-board TV would be used only for business purposes, Bazinet and others say that even entertainment programs are valuable because they help harried executives relax.

For Airshow President Dennis Ferguson, the deal validates a costly effort to develop a miniature 12-inch dish antenna system that fits inside the tail of a big business jet and tracks television signals relayed from an orbiting satellite.

He says he knew that if Airshow could come up with a system, it would sell. After all, the business aviation market has a history of eagerly grabbing the newest technologies.

With Airshow TV, the company is looking at a business jet market with a potential total of nearly $2.5 billion worth of on-board TV systems. If commercial airlines start buying, the market could be 10 times bigger.

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Although the deal with Tenneco is Airshow’s first, Ferguson says several more are about to be completed. Airshow TV has been listed as a standard option for the Challenger and Global Express business jets made by Bombardier Business Aircraft in Montreal, and the long-range jets made by Gulfstream Aerospace Inc. in Savannah, Ga.

In all, Airshow’s other products are installed on about 3,000 business aircraft and more than 2,500 passenger jets on 100 airlines worldwide. They range from simple map displays that show passengers the location of their aircraft to Airshow’s custom-tailored text displays of news, business trends and stock market information.

But the new television system clearly shows the direction that Airshow is heading.

“We want to be able to provide clients with the latest information and the most up-to-date information technology that we can get into an airplane,” Ferguson said.

He won’t offer any details, but says that Airshow engineers are working on interactive systems that will provide ground-to-air video conferencing and give airplane passengers access to the Internet for the first time.

The increased emphasis on interactive communication between the airborne and the ground based isn’t coincidental. Since 1988, Airshow has been owned by Dynatech Corp., a $500-million-a-year maker of telecommunications products. During that time, Airshow’s employment has grown from about 20 workers to more than 120--with 60 jobs added in the past three years alone.

Airshow was started in Tustin by a pair of entrepreneurs in 1980 to provide video entertainment to passengers on corporate jets. Its first product was a video monitor hooked up to an Atari game system and a videocassette player, housed in a wooden cabinet and strapped into a vacant seat.

Within a year, however, the company’s focus shifted from entertaining to providing flight information to passengers who increasingly were making longer business flights and wanted to know where they were and when they would land.

Founders Allen Muesse, an aircraft navigational systems engineer, and Steve Long, an aircraft sales executive, developed a moving map display that took flight data from the aircraft’s cockpit and showed it to passengers on a video monitor. The Airshow 100 system also used a moving aircraft icon to pinpoint the plane’s exact location along its flight route.

After Muesse and Long sold out to Massachusetts-based Dynatech, more features were added to the system, including foreign languages and CD-ROM storage of information. Another improvement enables passengers to see where they are in relation to their corporate headquarters and to major cities and other points of interest along their route.

Last year, as part of its move into telecommunications, the company began providing information services as well as electronic equipment. Airline and business jet passengers now can get news reports from online wire services through a new system called Airshow Network. Programmers in Airshow’s Tustin headquarters pull data from the Internet, pare it to what the individual clients have ordered and broadcast it via computer modem to the customers’ airplanes.

But Network broadcasts text, and Airshow engineers wanted to get television broadcasts into airplanes.

“There is a need for business people to stay in touch on a real-time basis, and that’s why products like this come into the marketplace,” said David Almay, a vice president of the National Business Aviation Assn.

Airshow found, however, that it faces competition.

In mid-1996, Delta Air Lines Inc. said it would begin testing an airborne television system jointly developed by Pomona-based aircraft entertainment systems maker Hughes Avicom and satellite antenna designer Datron/Transco Inc. in Simi Valley.

“Ours had been in the planning process for a long time before we heard about Delta, so we are not copying,” Ferguson said.

But Airshow did turn to Datron to design an antenna for its system. The result is a 1-foot dish in the tail fin of a heavyweight business jet.

Bill Weaver, general manager of the Datron’s direct broadcast satellite division, figures that Airshow will be the first to profit from on-board television because it is selling to the business jet market. Commercial carriers are going to want to “wait and see” how the business community accepts airborne television, he said.

Officials at Delta, still the only passenger carrier testing on-board television, say the initial response has been enthusiastic. “We got standing ovations when we broadcast the World Series,” spokeswoman Erin Flynn said.

Delta is continuing to test on-board TV. It plans to test individual seat-back screens in 1998. The airline hasn’t committed to buying the system, though, and won’t say how soon it plans to make a decision.

One drawback might be concerns about whether passengers would pay for TV. The cost of equipping an airliner for on-board TV is substantial. The antenna and signal decoder could range from $200,000 to $400,000 per plane, but the cost of video screens and a video distribution system would push the total to more than $1 million per jet, Ferguson estimates.

Still, few doubt that commercial carriers will reject TV. And the market potential is huge. There are more than 10,000 passenger jets in use worldwide and the number is expected to double in the next 15 years.

Marketplace competition isn’t far away. Hughes-Avicom is being acquired by a unit of Costa Mesa-based Rockwell International Corp. and Rockwell wants to turn up the heat.

“While our market right now is commercial aviation, we are looking at applications in business aircraft, too,” said Clayton Callihan, spokesman for the company’s Rockwell-Collins subsidiary in Iowa.

Ferguson shrugs off the challenge. Competition, he says, is a fact of life, and Airshow is well respected in the aviation industry. He says his company ultimately will compete with Avicom for commercial airline sales just as Avicom intends to push into the business jet market.

“All of the things we are seeing right now from the aviation industry show that growth is going to continue well into the next decade, and the demand for telecommunications services on the aircraft is growing as well,” Ferguson said.

On the Air in the Air

Airshow Inc.’s Airshow TV system allows airplane passengers to receive live television broadcasts without worrying about time zones, frequency shifts and the like. Signals can be sent to one large monitor or to in-seat monitors that can be individually tuned. Here’s how the system works:

1. Satellite dish mounted inside aircraft tail picks up live broadcasts.

2. Decoder converts signal into individual channels and transmits them to cabin monitors.

3. Passengers may select from same news, entertainment, sports, digital music and pay-per-view programming available on the ground.

Airshow Inc. at a Glance

Headquarters: Tustin

Founded: 1980

President: Dennis Ferguson

Parent firm: Dynatech Corp.

Employees: 120

Products: Aircraft avionics, entertainment and information systems

Estimated annual revenue: $50 million

Source: Airshow Inc.; Researched by JANICE L. JONES/Los Angeles Times