Keeping it Plane Simple

Jim Jensen, Founder & CEO, SD, talks to Anthony Harrington about growing through the pandemic and preparing new breakthroughs

AH: Jim let’s start with the pandemic. How much did that affect SD, and what did you have to do by way of protective measures?

JJ: For a while, in Florida, all the restrictions were in place with everything shut, then we started returning to normal. However, all the way through we stayed focused on keeping our customers connected and continuing with our research and development projects.

AH: How have revenues held up through what has been quite a slow period for many in the industry, particularly with all the country-to-country flight restrictions through the last 20 months or so?

JJ: We are fortunate that we have a great mix of services, hardware, and software that we provide. With all our infrastructure and connectivity services we weathered the storm extremely well.

We are fortunate too that our military business experienced increased demand. The great thing about business aviation is that this industry really comes together in a crisis. This is a niche business, looked at on the global stage, and people really reach out to help each other. The partnerships we have with a whole range of organisations have really strengthened through this difficult period.

All in all, I think we have done a really good job through the pandemic in focusing our efforts and we have come out of this a lot stronger as an organisation. We’ve continued developing our Plane Simple? antenna series. Software development and R&D moved forward at a good pace, and we worked well with our partners. So now, with the market on a slow upward trajectory again, I feel we can say we have an even better understanding of our customers and what needs to be done to give them the best possible connectivity experience.

AH: We saw some absolutely shocking cyberattacks on the USA through the pandemic. Did you see a general rise in cybercrime as bad actors sought to take advantage of increased internet activity?

JJ: We definitely saw a sharp increase in cyberattacks, not just in our industry, but across the broader cyber-security arena. There was a marked increase, for example, in ransomware attacks. Everyone was communicating long-range and using the Internet to stay in touch, and the ratio of attacks went up and up.

We have a very strong set of security products across our networks, which have been designed for aviation security from the bottom up. Everything we offer is extremely robust, as like everything SD supplies, it has been designed to meet the very particular requirements of business aviation by business aviators. But yes, we saw a strong increase in bad actors trying to manipulate the situation.

On the plus side, this has prompted a corresponding increase in client awareness of the importance of cyber-security. This is true of both individual owners and corporate flight departments. We now have more corporations than ever before co-locating their servers in our data centres so that their networks are entirely insulated from the public internet.

AH: SD moved into the flight ops support arena some time ago. How has that prospered over the last two years?

JJ: Over the last 14 months or so Flight Ops Departments have really been under pressure to maximise their effectiveness, often with fewer staff actually in the office. That has been great for our PreFlight, PostFlight, and in-cabin products. We saw a rise in subscriptions for SD Pro?, and around 6,500 unique logins every month, which is fantastic.

On the ops side, we are adding more clients to the system every month, with a lot of interest in our scheduling (PreFlight) application. Customers are really interested in getting the most out of the aircraft when it is in the air.

So, again, we have used the last 14 months with our customers extremely well, I feel, and our whole team has performed fantastically. We are assisting our customers to become more efficient and to maximise the return on their flying assets.

AH: So, what would you say were the key milestones for SD over this period?

JJ: The really big milestones for us had to do with the traction our operational software offerings are getting with corporate and private flight departments. Our routers, of course, are the solid backbone of our business and they have done very well. We completed the next phase of our global terrestrial network upgrade as we enhanced our Asia Pacific presence by building out our point-of-presence in Australia to complement existing PoPs in Europe and North America.?

We’ve started to optimize the open architecture design of our systems by enabling customers to “plug-in” third-party software to support operations. For example, as the aircraft generates data during flight, this is transmitted via our SD Pro digital dashboard to third-party maintenance tracking software. This gives the ops teams real-time, validated information about how the aircraft is performing and creates efficiencies by delivering data directly to the third-party software. We don’t create, analyse, or use this data, we’re just enabling customers to use our infrastructure to more effectively manage and use their data.

Our Plane Simple antenna development project is also going extremely well with our first tail mounted antenna, supporting Ku-band with Intelsat FlexExec, currently in the flight-testing phase on board our G350.

Read the full article here: https://issuu.com/bizavmedia/docs/bam018_summer_2021/14?fr=sNTJmMTI3NzQ1NDc