Having started life mainly focused on the airline sector, Arinc (Booth No. N4221) has further expanded its horizons into business aviation, especially so since the U.S.-based group opened its international division in the UK back in 2000. Since the EBACE show in May, Arinc Direct has added more than 50 business aircraft to the international fleet it supports. Here at the NBAA convention, the company is launching an iPad application, which will provide access to its Arinc Direct flight-planning tools.

Arinc plans to make its electronic flight bag technology, developed for major carriers such as Cathay Pacific, available in the bizav sector. And now some of the technology transfer is going back in the other direction, with the company planning to make available for commercial airliners the Wi-Fi services it currently provides for business jets.

The Arinc Direct business unit that serves corporate aviation also has enhanced its flight-planning services in other ways. For example, it helps operators to comply with the requirements for safety management systems by incorporating an “SMS Risk Factor Form” that allows users to assign numerical values to risks, resulting in a total risk score for any given flight.

This past summer, Arinc Direct also entered into a partnership with FlightRisk.com (Booth No. C12434), which provides automated risk assessment and preflight risk awareness tools. It also incorporates postflight feedback from pilots to help with planning.

The latest release of Arinc Direct’s flight-planning software also has enhanced graphical capabilities, with pilots now able to graphically manipulate routes on charts. “With our latest release, we have implemented the ability to dynamically modify a flight-plan route using our SkyVector mapping application,” explained the company’s director of flight operations, Gary Gambarani. “The resulting route on the map is then used to compute and file a flight plan.”

Arinc Direct senior business manager James Hardie described this process as “rubber banding.” The graphical interface also includes overlay features such as Sigmets, weather radar and turbulence.

According to Randy Pizzi, vice president of Arinc’s international division, the company is stepping up investment in VHF Acars for wider coverage, as it is a core datalink communications service. It is part of what he described as the “e-enabled aircraft” with EFBs, Wi-Fi onboard via satcom links and web-based flight planning.

Andy Hubbard, managing director of Arinc’s international division, said an initiative in Europe through which the company is working with Eurocontrol will lead to a new datalink testbed and a “world first that will set the standard for digital messaging.”

Meanwhile, satellite communication is moving forward as well, with Inmarsat having appointed Arinc as a distributor for its SwiftBroadband service last year.  Services in the higher bandwidth Ka band, which will offer, for example, live video conferencing on board because of the wider bandwidth possible, are expected in around 2014.

Arinc is seeking to roll out SwiftBroadband connections for airlines, partly thanks to Inmarsat’s new pricing structure, which makes it possible for the company to provide users with flat-rate services that can be offered over in-flight Wi-Fi.

It can obtain supplemental type certificates for aircraft and install the Wi-Fi router equipment to link with the satcom equipment.

Senior business manager Hardie said a bizjet Wi-Fi hotspot has been built and tested and the company is “looking forward to engaging with the customer to launch.” Arinc is “building the infrastructure and connectivity,” he added.