Dassault Falcon (Booth 7201) is claiming to be the first OEM to bring high-speed Internet access to the sky, in a production aircraft, with installation of an HSD-128 satcom unit on the firm's Falcon 900EX demonstrator.

The initial four-hour flight took place on April 30 from Dassault's completion center in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Truly convenient, real-time, onboard-aircraft e-mail and web-surfing seems chronically a step or three away, with the market hotly contested by companies including Honeywell, Rockwell and Atlanta-based EMS Technologies, which is sharing Booth 7100 here with Inmarsat.

All three are using Inmarsat's Swift64 service.

Dassault's use of the AMT-50 high-gain antenna marks a victory for manufacturer EMS. Coupled with the HSD-128 single box data solution, an 8 MCU package, it affords users "global digital geo-stationary satellite communications with 25 times the speed and efficiency (per channel of previous airborne satcom systems," Dassault says. It can support up to four users at once.

"Our customers are in the habit of accomplishing as much business as possible during their flights," said Dassault Falcon president John Rosanvallon. "With the installation of HSD-128, they will have easy access to the Internet as well as a high-quality phone connection."

The HSD-128 is said to be the first available stand-alone high speed data satcom with a pair of independent channels, each capable of uncompressed, 64-kilobyte-per-second symmetric bandwidth. Today's standard is a tortoise-like 2.4Kbps.

The phone connection boasts 4.8Kbps bandwidth, and thus eliminates the "tin-can" sound of existing 2.4Kbps systems, Dassault says.