I (don’t) spy with my little eye …

“Some of our newer inflight entertainment systems provided by the original equipment manufacturers do have a camera embedded in the hardware. These cameras have been disabled on our aircraft, and there are no plans to develop any features using the cameras,” said Singapore Airlines in response, noting that “these cameras on our newer IFE systems were provided by the original equipment manufacturers.

We have no plans to enable or develop any features using the cameras. ” Singapore Airlines’ implication that the cameras simply came with the system doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The airline is rightly renowned for its award-winning investment in inflight entertainment as well as the technology behind it. But these IFE systems are not off-the-shelf: on this aircraft they are custom-made for each airline by Panasonic Avionics in a small factory in Kadoma near Osaka in Japan that your author has visited. It’s not a ‘well, we bought some iPads and they had cameras in them’ situation.

The existence of cameras is not news within the passenger experience side of the industry, but they are largely preparatory for future opportunities. Inflight entertainment systems have decade-plus hardware lives, and if there’s a reasonable expectation that a killer app might come around before 2030 or so that might use one, the small weight penalty is worth it.

So what might that look like? It might be as simple as a Snapchatstyle airline-branded selfie filter, some examples of which Panasonic’s competitor Thales was showing off at last year’s Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) Expo.

Your author also has a funny feeling that the most likely use is for large-scale data aggregation. Might an airline, inflight entertainment supplier or aircraft manufacturer benefit from live data on when in a flight people are asleep or how restless they are, how long meal X vs meal Y takes to eat, what they’re doing when not watching inflight entertainment, and any number of other questions that, until now, have been answered by qualitative rather than quantitative data? APEX, the former World Airline Entertainment Association, has been positioning itself as an industry trade body, so it was unsurprising that its CEO Joe Leader leapt to the defence of cameras.

“Since the advent of the smartphone a decade ago, airlines realised that they need to be thinking ahead to serve the future travel experience,” Joe Leader stated. “The systems selected years ago are now on aircraft today and in many cases will be on aircraft for the next decade. With explicit customer permission, airlines will be able to provide better service and safety to their passengers using new technology. ” Leader cited inter-seat communication, medical wellness, gaming, entertainment, food, beverage, service, safety, and security, with a variety of options from pie-in-the-sky to practical.

Indeed, many of the proposed options for technology are eye-rollingly unlikely. Communicating seat-to-seat via video chat sounds like the worst idea since being able to thump a text message into the seatback system and send it to another seat.

Safety is perhaps the most reasonable use case. There’s a lot to be said for flight attendants to be able to do an invisible welfare check on a passenger reported to have had too much to drink, for example. Of course, this needs to be balanced with privacy: flight attendants must not be able to spy on the attractive person in row 23.

Perhaps a signoff from senior cabin crew, together with a reason for activating the camera and recording of both ends of the viewing session, as well as mandatory notification of the passenger after the flight, would be sufficient.

For passengers, privacy is a reasonable concern. Numerous airlines have had a major data breach in the last couple of years, seemingly without any consequences to them but with potential disruption to hundreds of thousands of customers.

This is more than the potential embarrassment of someone watching you pick your nose: the travel habits, health status and level of jetlag that senior executives or government officials might be experiencing at any one time is a substantial piece of industrial or state espionage information. It’s not clear that airlines — whose IT systems are generally a hodgepodge of thirdparty vendors, technology from the last millennium and hacky workarounds to bring it all together — are prepared to meet that threat.

‘These cameras have been disabled on our aircraft. ’ SINGAPORE AIRLINES