September 22, 2005; Hamburg - AMERICAN Airlines announced here this morning that it had selected Inflight Canada’s iCACHE underfloor installation solution for its 58-aircraft fleet of Boeing 767-300s.

Primarily forming part of a refurbishment of the 767s’ business class that includes new IFE and lie-flat seats, the iCACHE implementation will also bring benefits to the economy cabin.

In business class all of the existing IFE seatboxes and laptop power supplies will be removed from the seats and relocated in eight underfloor clusters, where they will be efficiently cooled and completely protected from dust, spills and knocks.

In addition, in-seat power, again located in underfloor clusters, will be installed for the first time in the front three rows of the economy cabin.

Finally, in economy Inflight Canada is replacing the existing seat-track cable raceway for the audio system with an underfloor solution.

The first aircraft to be modified is scheduled to go into the shop in February and to be completed early in March. “American is looking to us to turn each aircraft round inside a week once we have standardised the installation routine,” says Rick Sine, who is representing Inflight Canada here. The iCACHE installation programme is expected to run to the end of 2007.

Montreal-based Inflight Canada developed iCACHE in an effort to improve IFE serviceability by relocating all IFE and in-seat power boxes and harnesses to compartments beneath the cabin floor, incidentally freeing large amounts of cabin volume and increasing passenger comfort.

It is also intended to reduce the amount of time needed for cleaning and maintenance on the ground, allow seat equipment to be installed and removed with greater ease, and eliminate the need to remove – and risk damaging - seat-to-seat harnesses during aircraft C-checks.

iCACHE implementations have also been ordered by Virgin America and Air Canada, with the latter using it as the basis of a radical lightweight IFE solution from Thales Avionics that is suitable for aircraft as small as the carrier’s new Bombardier CRJ705 and Embraer 175 and 190 regional jets.

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