Ye Wang with the Gogo Galileo HDX antenna
Excitement is in the air as we complete another milestone in Gogo’s innovation journey and launch Gogo Galileo. Earlier this fall, our engineering team started flight testing the Gogo Galileo HDX antenna. As of the beginning of October, we completed the first phase of flight testing. To understand what has occurred through this first phase of testing, what the team has been doing to make improvements, and what’s on the horizon, Ye Wang, Airborne Platform Software Engineering Manager, gave us an HDX flight-testing update.
Flight testing the Gogo Galileo HDX antenna on the Challenger 300
Since September, Gogo has been flight testing its Galileo HDX antenna onboard a Challenger 300. The team has been working seven days a week to conduct numerous flights crisscrossing the Southwestern United States, bowing only to Mother Nature.
“Flight testing is a crucial step because the engineering team needs to verify the HDX’s performance and stability in actual flights,” Ye said. “During testing, the team flushes out any issues and resolves them well before launch.”
During flight testing, the team did what any business aviation passenger or crew would need to do in flight, including Zoom meetings, Teams calls, and video streaming on multiple devices along different routes and directions. Ye stressed they are doing those same online activities because they help validate what the actual customer experience will feel like.
The engineering team flight testing Gogo Galileo HDX
Since the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites in the Gogo Galileo constellation travel in a plane running similar to the lines of longitude, it was essential that in this phase of testing the team evaluated two things:
1) handoffs from satellites of different satellite planes
2) handoffs between satellites in the same plane
During the various routes flown, the team connected the HDX antenna to the LEO network and performed two distinct tests to verify the performance and stability of the network and system: ping and iPerf testing. Ye explained: “Our goal in ping testing was to establish a baseline for network connectivity. With the iPerf testing, we tried to push the maximum bandwidth to look at the stability and performance.”
On one of these test flights, a customer experience engineer from Gogo was able to ride along to evaluate what the customer experience would be like. Similar to how a typical business traveler carries multiple devices, he, too, connected his phone, laptop, iPad, and watch to the HDX antenna and LEO network. That engineer described his experience, “I connected to the HDX and LEO network easily with various devices. I did a Facetime call to the office. There was no buffering or lag time. I also streamed multiple videos without any delay using Netflix, YouTube, NBC News and others. I can verity it is as fast or faster than my home or office Wi-Fi experience.”
The flight testing team's office in the sky
During a recent test flight as the team was working from their office in the sky, the picture above was captured as they flew over the Rocky Mountains.
The next phases of flight testing will include flights to Alaska to test polar coverage as well as along equatorial routes and along the East Coast of the United States. All three routes will test performance and stability and will occur in the next couple of weeks.
Once the engineering testing is complete, the next phase is to support our partners’ STC efforts and to secure Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA). Gogo Galileo remains on track and is expected to launch late this year.
