I wanted to share some very exciting news from the Customer Experience team highlighting our ongoing interior projects. This update covers the 767-300ER New Interior Program, which I’m betting will elicit a lot of excitement from our customers and crews when the first aircraft enters service today!

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at the pics below, which illustrate just how dramatic this “extreme makeover” really is. The new interior mirrors the product we provide on our 767-400ER fleet.

The prototype 767-300ER (ship 1608) arrived in Atlanta last night and is undergoing final inspections before returning to service on the Atlanta-Manchester, UK flight later in the evening. The aircraft will also be flying from our JFK hub with rotations to Accra,, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Dublin, Moscow, Pisa, Venice and Zurich. You can also expect to see the aircraft flow through Seattle with flights to Beijing and Osaka in the future.

The second 767-300ER is scheduled to begin its modification this weekend and the third is scheduled to begin on Aug. 15. A total of (7) 767-300ERs with new interiors, flat-bed seats and full cabin AVOD are scheduled to be in service by the end of this year, bringing the total number of flat bed-equipped aircraft to 46.

For those of you who want the ‘detailed’ details (you all know who you are)…here’s an overview of the new interior product:

BusinessElite

• 36 seats in 1 x 2 x 1 layout
• New seats are 20% wider than the cradle seats they replace
• 180º fully flat bed
• Direct aisle access
• Electronic seat controls with adjustable lumbar support
• 110v AC in-seat power + USB power
• Adjustable personal LED reading light
• Redesigned “flip-top” tray table mechanism with wide console

Economy Comfort

• 29 seats at 35” pitch in 2 x 3 x 2 layout
• “Slim-line” seats providing more personal space
• Adjustable headrests
• 110v AC in-seat power + USB power

Economy

• 143 seats at 31-32” pitch in 2 x 3 x 2 layout
• “Slim-line” seats providing more personal space
• Adjustable headrests
• USB power

In-Flight Entertainment

• Personal On Demand Entertainment
• 10.6”screens in BusinessElite (50% larger than previous screens); 7” in Economy
• 28 films (expanding to 100 films Sept. 1)
• 40 hours of HBO
• 25 hours of TV in 6 categories
• 4,100 digital songs in 14 music genres
• 15 games
• Moving map

Cabin Enhancements

• New ceilings, sidewalls and Passenger Service Units
• New LED lighting
• New lavatories
• New high-capacity overhead bins
• New galleys

And as always, I’d like to extend a special thanks to the men and women of TechOps for all their hard work on this project.

Have a great weekend!

Chris B.

Sr. Product Manager – Customer Experience

Few airplanes are as iconic as the Boeing 747. No matter how many new airplanes we’ve introduced since the current 747s joined our fleet, customers still love to see those double-deckers pull up to the gate. That’s why all of us on the customer experience team are excited to bring you a complete face-lift for the interiors of our 16 747-400s! These changes are sure to make flying a Delta double-decker an even better experience.

As part of our $1 billion investment in global products and services through 2013, we’ll replace and remake every seat inside the 747s to completely revitalize the flying experience. Between summer 2011 and 2012, we’ll install 48 fully horizontal flat-bed seats in the BusinessElite cabin and 338 new seats in the Economy cabin.

When you walk onboard you’ll immediately discover the new benefits:

• Personal, on-demand entertainment in every seat. In Economy we’ll ditch the old overhead projection systems as we install new seats loaded up with technology. The new seats will be embedded with a nine-inch touch-screen entertainment system (I promise you’ll feel a lot like you’re using your iPhone or iPad!) and will offer access to movie titles, TV shows, digital music tracks, interactive games and a USB port to charge iPods and other electronic devices.
• Added personal space for new comfort in Economy. Each new Economy class seat adds 1.5 inches of additional personal space through a “slimline” design that more efficiently uses cabin space than the older, heavier seats they replace. In addition to the 1.5 inches you’ll find at your knees, your bags also will gain some breathing room with larger under-seat storage space.
• A nearly seven-foot bed to stretch out on in BusinessElite. That’s right, even our tallest customers will be able to fly flat out in these new seats! The new seats are similar to the popular flat-bed product offered on our 777-200LR fleet today but with one notable change – they’ll be configured in a new layout, moving window seats to face the window and center cabin seats to face towards each other for customers flying together. These seats, like our other full-flat products, will all have direct aisle access and also include 120-volt universal power outlets, USB ports and 15.4-inch video monitors.
• Lots of movies, music and games.  The in-flight entertainment server powering all these new seats is big and fast. So big and fast, in fact, that it enables nearly 400 customers to watch 250 different movies, play dozens of different games and listen to 4,000 music tracks on demand all at one time.

You’ll see the first of these revitalized 747s flying as soon as next summer, primarily to and from our Tokyo-Narita hub.

Check out the images of what we’ve designed here. We’re proud of this upgrade and we hope you like the latest in a long list of new Delta product improvements to come!

Mike B.

Customer Experience Team

So I stretched the two-week update window to four weeks…where does the time go!?! Since my last update, we slipped past the 400 mark and are well on the way to achieving our goal of completing the entire domestic mainline fleet by this summer. I want to make a point of thanking our Engineering group and the Aircell technical teams responsible for the Wi-Fi installations. I still find it extraordinary that in just 18 months Delta will have gone from 1 airplane to a fleet of 540. So again, kudos to the folks at TechOps and the Aircell installation teams.

Our Wi-Fi partner, Aircell, continues to enhance the Gogo network with the introduction of new cell towers and by splitting existing towers into additional sectors. This “sectorization” provides more bandwidth to each plane, which enhances the onboard broadband experience — especially within high traffic flight paths — like the Northeast corridor.

Also of note, our friends (and codeshare partners) at Alaska Airlines, recently announced that they would be equipping their entire fleet with Gogo Inflight Internet…and Aircell announced additional cell towers would be installed in Alaska in order to cover the Alaska Airlines network. Good stuff.

Delta by the numbers…some interesting factoids:

The 437 Wi-Fi-equipped Delta aircraft represent 56% of the world’s entire Wi-Fi-enabled fleet.

Delta offers nearly 1,400 daily domestic flights with Wi-Fi; each day 180,000 customers fly on Wi-Fi-enabled Delta planes.

Since the launch of inflight Wi-Fi in December 2008, more than 1 million customers have used Wi-Fi on Delta planes.

Fleet Deets:

B737-700 10 (Fleet complete)
B737-800 71 (Fleet complete…note that 2 additional 737-800s will be equipped with Wi-Fi prior to joining the fleet)
B757-200 103 of 132
B757-200 ETOPS 17 of 17 (fleet complete)
B757-300 1 of 16 (deactivated pending STC)
B767-300 10 (Fleet complete)
B767-300 ETOPS 0 of 4
A319 47 of 49
A320 44 of 69
DC9-50 1 of 33 (deactivated pending STC)
MD88 117 (Fleet complete)
MD90 16 (Fleet complete…note that 12 additional MD90s will be equipped with Wi-Fi prior to joining the fleet)

We’re just about finished with the A319 fleet and the A320 fleet is more than halfway done. I’d love to hear from the folks in MSP, DTW and MEM (where most of the Airbus narrowbodies are based). Who’s surfed the Web on our Airbus fleet? How was the experience?

Chris B.
Sr. Product Manager, IFE