The Boeing Company issues the award annually to recognize suppliers who have achieved superior performance. San Juan Software maintained a Gold composite performance rating for each month of the 12-month performance period, from October 2017 to September 2018. This is the third year in a row that San Juan Software has received this award.
This year, Boeing recognized 380 suppliers who achieved either a Gold or Silver level Boeing Performance Excellence Award. San Juan Software is one of only 82 suppliers to receive the Gold level of recognition.
If you removed all the wires from a widebody passenger jet and strung them end-to-end, you could connect St. Louis to Chicago or London to Amsterdam, distances of approximately 500 kilometers. If you rolled these 100,000 wires into a ball with the harnesses that hold them to the aircraft structure and put the ball on a scale, it would tip to nearly 7,400 kilograms or about 3 percent of the aircraft's weight. First to go would be wiring for non-avionics functions, such as control of cabin lighting and passenger audio-video equipment or devices gathering routine health-management data from around the plane. Next might be safety-related wiring linked to smoke detectors, emergency lighting, cabin-pressure sensing and avionics, and eventually even commands that move the plane's flight-control surfaces.
Passengers are already using their smartphones to check in remotely and select their in-flight entertainment. What’s next? App-controlled cabin and seat concepts developed by Boeing, Recaro and Panasonic Avionics could hold the answer. Tomorrow’s passenger experience will be in passengers’ hands – literally. Remote control apps on our mobile devices are helping us manage our homes, cars and hotel rooms. Land Rover is even developing a system for smartphone-controlled driving, similar to flying a drone. Much of the technology is already available on private jets, offering VIPs full control of their cabin environments, entertainment, seats and window shades. App-based controls are hardly a remote possibility for commercial airlines. Boeing is conducting trials of vCabin, a concept that would allow passengers to control their reading light, order a meal or check if the lavatory is free from their smartphones. “We’re really thinking about pushing the boundaries past what we know today,” says Dan Bittner, lead engineer of Product Development at Boeing. “What it offers the passenger is a way to interact with the airplane like never before.”