Ever since Collins Aerospace sold off its airline in-flight entertainment (IFE) business to digEcor (now Burrana), it’s had to fight the perception that it got out of the cabin products business altogether. The day of the announcement, Mark Zimmerman, director of business development for Collins’s VVIP and head-of-state solutions, told AIN he fielded calls from his completions center customers asking, “‘Mark, you don’t work for Collins anymore?’” To this day, some in the industry don’t realize that Collins remains in the IFE sector for business jets and VVIP and continues to have a robust cabin business. “I don’t know that we did the greatest job of articulating that message,” Zimmerman explained.

But he’s hoping that message comes through loud and clear at EBACE 2019, where Collins (Booth R71, SD-402) will have its full complement of services and products on display for business jet and VVIP cabins. In Geneva, it will announce that its cabin products now have a position on a Airbus Corporate Jets ACJ320neo and a Boeing Business Jets BBJ 737 Max. It also will announce that Collins is currently involved in seven aircraft cabin retrofits or completions in Europe. “That’s a tremendous amount of projects that we’ve got going on,” Zimmerman said.

Just in cabin management systems (CMS) alone, Collins has exceeded 1,250 Venue CMS installs through its OEM partners and its aftermarket retrofit business, he noted. And tracing the company’s history back to when it was Rockwell Collins, some 4,000 business jets and VIP aircraft are flying with some form of its CMS, Zimmerman added. “So there’s a huge commitment from Collins to the business jet cabin business.”

Between Rockwell Collins’s 2017 acquisition of B/E Aerospace and its 2018 acquisition by UTC, creating Collins Aerospace, “the amount of offerings that we have for a cabin is really tremendous, and the opportunities to integrate various products together to make efficiencies within the completions centers or OEMS better, I think, exists more than ever with the product portfolio that we have.” That would include galley inserts, cabin lighting, touchscreen controllers—for cabin lighting, window shades and temperature—and 4K monitors as well as the integration of power and USB outlets into cabin seating. 

Collins also plans to announce at EBACE improvements to its Stage entertainment content service, namely integrating the previously wireless-only service into its Venue CMS, allowing it to be viewed on bulkhead monitors. “So if there’s a 75-inch monitor with stereo surround sound in your theater room on a 747, we can now watch all of these blockbuster movies,” Zimmerman said.

Collins continually looks for ways to add new content to its cloud-based Stage service, he added, including content “we have procured directly from Hollywood studios. As the Stage system is deployed more around the globe, we will find other content solutions; let’s say in China or India, [where] we’re working with Bollywood to get content.” 

And just as the company is looking to improve its entertainment offerings, Collins is also continually looking at other technologies or products to add to business jet cabins, such as a voice command system similar to Apple’s Siri or Google Home. “So the next frontier is 'what is the consumer market doing that these high-net-worth individuals are going to want in the cabin in the future?'” he said.