January 14 2025  |  Inflight Entertainment

Thales Inflyt Experience CEO talks powering and future-proofing Delta Sync with FlytEDGE

By Robynne Trueman


Delta One IFE powered by FlytEDGE

Delta Air Lines revealed at CES 2025 in Las Vegas this week that Thales InFlyt Experience’s FlytEDGE cloud-native IFE system will power the next-generation Delta Sync seatback experience. The airline expects to bring this inflight entertainment experience onboard beginning in 2026.

The hardware and software technologies of the system, powered by the first cloud-native IFE infrastructure, include cinematic 4K QLED HDR seatback displays with more than one billion vibrant colours and Bluetooth® capabilities for pairing wireless devices. The software platform runs on Thales’ Onboard Data Center (ODC) with 96TB of storage to enable edge caching and an intelligent recommendation engine that tailors content to passenger preferences.


Niels Steenstrup, CEO of Thales InFlyt Experience

Niels Steenstrup, CEO of Thales InFlyt Experience, highlights the shared commitment to innovation between Thales and Delta.

"It's about seamless travel. It's about understanding how travellers spend their time onboard and providing the technology to support that," he tells PAX Tech. "It's about the experience."

Driving the “Delta difference”




Passenger view of Delta IFE display 

On January 7, Ed Bastian, Delta CEO, took the stage at CES to deliver a keynote speech in which he unveiled several technology partnerships that will enable the airline to improve the end-to-end passenger journey in the coming months and years.

Bastian referred to the “Delta difference” as personalizing the passenger experience by ensuring airline staff and cabin crew are familiar with a traveller’s preferences, reason for travelling, milestones they may be celebrating and more.

Delta has 165,000 seatback displays flying today. Steenstrup tells PAX Tech that anytime a passenger is sitting on an aircraft with a seatback display, “It's an opportunity to create a great travel experience through personalization.”

It is with this customized passenger experience in mind that Delta partners with Thales, using FlytEDGE to power Delta Sync. Several features enabled by FlytEDGE are set to help Delta achieve its goals in expanding personalization and accessibility for passengers, including an Onboard Experience Planner, Seatback Announcement Translation and Arrival Mode.

The Onboard Experience Planner includes seatback features such as “Do Not Disturb” mode to give passengers the privacy and quiet they may need inflight. Future enhancements are set to include guided wellness and expanded options for customizing the food and beverage experience.

In terms of making the travel experience more accessible, the Seatback Announcement Translation is designed to help passengers understand crucial flight information. This service supports passengers with hearing disabilities or who may speak a different language than the flight crew communicates in, by providing flight attendants with the ability to send messages to seatback displays in the passenger’s preferred language.

Personalization comes into play with the Arrival Mode feature, which integrates travel information from the Fly Delta app directly into the seatback environment. With this customization, SkyMiles Members have the information they need across all devices from gate-to-gate.

Simplifying content curation

For airlines, FlytEDGE facilitates data-driven decisions to constantly adapt the passenger interface with new features and curated entertainment at every seat. With the cloud-native system, Delta will be able to deploy the latest updates instantly to individual aircraft or the entire fleet. This seamless process will allow the airline to deliver the newest content curated by the Delta Studio Team to passengers more efficiently.

“From an operations and management perspective, Delta can deliver content and updates directly to the aircraft,” Steenstrup explains. “Anything that can run on the web can run on the aircraft, with FlytEDGE.”

The connected cloud-architecture enables quick integration of Delta’s digital partners, improved data flow and future-proofs the aircraft’s IFE system.

“It means Delta is not going to have to wait for these monolithic releases every six, nine or 12 months to create a new experience for its passengers,” Steenstrup says, instead comparing the system upgrade process to updating an app on a smartphone. “That is a paradigm shift in terms of how IFE is done. They can link it into the backend operation systems, operate more efficiently, reduce costs and improve reliability. There's a lot of benefits.”

In addition to the partnership with Thales, Delta highlighted a variety of other technology partnerships to elevate the passenger journey at CES, including collaborations with Airbus, Uber and YouTube.

“We expect many of the features shown today will be on our planes this year and we continue to find new partners to bring into our ecosystem,” said Bastian during his keynote speech at CES.

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