Pro Star Aviation’s Jeff Shaw knows what his customers want: “An office in the sky.” But he also knows that it’s not always easy to deliver on those expectations. From inflight email to inflight VPN, requirements are complex. “They really want that ‘office in the sky’ experience,” Jeff explains, “But previous versions of other connectivity solutions were too slow or didn’t connect where they wanted.” But with AVANCE L5? “Now it’s seamless. What they see on the ground is what they see in the sky.”
Jeff isn’t new to inflight connectivity. A long-time Gogo dealer that primarily installs systems on business jets, Pro Star Aviation has set up everything from legacy systems to the new AVANCE L3 and L5 products. In Jeff’s experience, however, AVANCE offers something new both operationally and to Pro Star customers.
From an operational perspective, Jeff is pleased with Gogo’s network troubleshooting. “[Gogo] is able to get true metrics from the network to determine what’s not connecting properly… that kind of evaluation inflight live is almost unheard of,” he shares.
But the experience of flying with L5 is even more impressive. On a flight following one of Pro Star’s first AVANCE installations, Jeff shared a Gulfstream with 12 other passengers. “Some people were streaming movies, some were checking email on VPN, and everybody was able to do what they wanted. The fact that you can get an entire Gulfstream doing what they needed to do - there aren’t too many systems that can do that.”
Jeff sums up the effect of an AVANCE installation in three words: “It just works.” Although that sounds simple, at 40,000 feet it can be anything but. “There aren’t too many things, whether it’s flight deck connectivity, flight tech avionics, CPDLC… there’s not too many things that you install that just work.” For Pro Star and their customers, a system that works as advertised makes all the difference.
