Satellite communications company Hanwha Phasor has partnered with Lufthansa Technik, a providers of technical aircraft services, to deliver advanced in-flight connectivity for commercial flights. A recently signed multi-year agreement will see Lufthansa Technik design, build and supply several hundred fuselage-mounted airborne Satellite Communications (SatCom) radomes for Hanwha Phasor each year.
The radomes act as outer shells to cover and protect the antenna. Mounted on the top of the fuselage, the antenna requires such protection from wind and weather. The design does not just have to be tough though: it also has to be transparent to radio frequencies (RF) and have only negligible impact on the aircraft’s aerodynamics. Already in the final design phase, Lufthansa Technik says the first radome prototypes could be built as early as summer 2024, with series production set to commence in 2025.
The engineers in Lufthansa Technik’s development programme for the new radome have paid special attention to Hanwha Phasor’s advanced electronically steered antenna technology, for example by employing entirely new composite material combinations and novel design methods. The team claim this work is set to ultimately result in one of the world’s first aviation-certified radome design solutions for this new type of antennas.
The partnership signifies a key milestone for Hanwha Phasor, which is preparing to bring its aerospace solution, the Phasor A7700, to the market in 2025. The collaboration with Lufthansa Technik follows several recent announcements from Hanwha Phasor, each signalling a step to market for its satellite communications solutions. This includes a User Terminal Development Agreement with OneWeb, a global Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation, which will see the business working towards becoming a terminal on the network over the coming year.
Lufthansa Technik will also contribute its expertise on aircraft integration, and also its production capabilities in the composite material workshop at its Hamburg headquarters. There is scope for the facility to ‘significantly expand’ its annual output, to cope with any growing needs arising from future collaboration with Hanwha Phasor, Alongside this, the agreement will explore further opportunities to collaborate, streamlining aircraft integration to ensure future non-disrupted communications for users on-the-move.
Lufthansa Technik’s experience in the aerospace sector and its triple certification as a maintenance, design and production organisation will moreover provide Hanwha Phasor with the required expertise to ensure efficient application of its radome-covered antenna to commercial aircraft fleets around the world.
Harald Gloy, chief operations officer at Lufthansa Technik stated: “Reliable inflight connectivity is key for the onboard product quality of airlines around the world. Key advancements in antenna technology thereby require equally ingenuous advancements for the radomes that protect these antennas. With our decades-long expertise in this field, we will be one of the first to develop and produce an aviation-certified radome solution for the most modern phased-array antennas, and thus provide Hanwha Phasor with perfect coverage, both from a design and a production point of view.”
