Revolutionizing In-Flight Experience: A Chat with Satcom Guru Peter Lemme

In this special episode of "The Jump Seat," host Chris Glass sits down with Peter Lemme, a veteran in the field of aviation technology, live from the AMC conference in Phoenix, Arizona. With a career that began at Boeing in 1981, Peter has been a pivotal figure in the development of Satcom and in-flight connectivity. He shares his fascinating journey from working on automatic flight controls to becoming a thought leader in the Seamless Air Alliance.

Peter delves into the early challenges of implementing Satcom, recounting the evolution of technology that transformed in-flight communication. He discusses the impact of modern advancements like low-Earth orbit networks and the potential future disruptions in the industry, including the integration of augmented reality in-flight experiences.

Additionally, Peter talks about his passion project, the Satcom Guru blog, where he shares his extensive knowledge on aeronautical Satcom, and reflects on the honour of receiving the Velare award for his pioneering contributions.

Chapters

• 0:00 Evolution of SATCOM in Aviation
• 12:27 Future Trends in Inflight Connectivity
• 19:55 Enhancing in-Flight Passenger Experience

Transcript

Chris Glass: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of the Jump Seat. We are still here in Phoenix, Arizona. This is day number three of the AMC conference and I am with Peter Lemme. Peter Lemme. So welcome to the Jump Seat.

Peter Lemme: 0:11

Thank you.

Chris Glass: 0:12

So let's start off with telling everybody a little bit about yourself. So if we get a little bit of your history, which I was reading up on today, quite fascinating, you have quite a distinguished career, thank you.

Peter Lemme: 0:25

I started at Boeing in 1981. I worked in automatic flight controls, started in pitch augmentation, went to thrust management. About seven or eight years down that road, after the 5767 and 47400 had sort of finished their certifications, I transitioned over to Datalink and SATCOM and happened to pick up kind of the very early stage of those technologies, in particular SATCOM. I stayed with Boeing until 1997, managed to kind of certify the first Inmarsat system for Datalink, the first for air traffic control voice, the first air traffic control data fan systems, and I left. I went to go work with Iridium for a few years. They went bankrupt. So that was kind of the end of that path was trying to develop an aeronautical terminal for using that Iridium radio. And then I did some consulting and I ended up with a company called Tenzing which was trying to bring email to passengers.

Chris Glass: 1:26

Right.

Peter Lemme: 1:26

And we ended up getting investment from Airbus and our competitor was Connection by Boeing. And those were a heady few years until 911, which was a big transformation. That's really the beginning of KU band, or, you know, just big geostationary broadband communication, and after that I went back into consulting. I've been consulting ever since. I've worked a variety of projects, some on nav radios, but mostly Datalink and SATCOM and in-flight connectivity, and today I'm a thought leader for the Seamless Air Alliance developing standards for in-flight connectivity. I do that on a consulting basis.

Chris Glass: 2:07

That's a pretty hefty career that you've had. That you just rattled through in two minutes. So let's go back to the start. When we're talking about SATCOM because I think that's what you're best known for Can we talk about the early days and some of the challenges that you went through with such an emerging technology Like it's one that I think we take for granted a little bit today, but back then that was cutting edge.

Peter Lemme: 2:31

It was it still is, but Well, it's evolving, so we keep finding new frontiers to grow through. But there was a push in the 70s to bring SATCOM to the airplane. It was actually a VHF repeater network.

Chris Glass: 2:48

Right.

Peter Lemme: 2:48

We've got space-based VHF reemerging now.

Peter Lemme: 2:51

Right 55 years later. So it's coming to be. That was the AEROSAT program. I wasn't involved in that but it kind of died on the vine and INMARSAT sort of came out of that process and INMARSAT had some satellite resources and Inmarsat sort of came out of that process and Inmarsat had some satellite resources and there was interest in using it for aeronautical and so Boeing on the 747-400, took commitments from quite a few airlines to deliver an Inmarsat SACOM terminal and it fell kind of on my shoulders in the end to carry that process through. We had Rockwell Collins was the supplier at those times. It was just a low-gain antenna. The raw data rate was 300 bits per second. The throughput was 88 bits per second.

Chris Glass: 3:37

Right.

Peter Lemme: 3:37

Which I marveled on Monday, noting that today we can bring a million times more data rate to the airplane than we did back then.

Peter Lemme: 3:47

It was first certified in 1989, and all it did was ACARS data link. That's the only application we had. The funny thing about that was I was working ACARS and the SATCOM group wasn't part of my group at the time, because the only thing you could do was ACARS. They needed us to test it. They could turn it on, they could see that it appeared to be logged in, but they couldn't actually communicate.

Chris Glass: 4:10

Wow.

Peter Lemme: 4:11

And so my group that was doing ACARS became very involved in it and ultimately I ended up taking on both those programs. We moved into high-gain antennas and voice applications and the idea was, hey, we could bring voice to the flight deck as well.

Chris Glass: 4:29

Yeah.

Peter Lemme: 4:30

We never really had pondered that this was a whole new frontier for us. So we had to come up with how the audio interfaces would work like the audio panel and how the pilot would tune it, how they would dial.

Peter Lemme: 4:45

It was a public switch telephone network. A phone, basically, was what it provided and, you know, telling the pilot if they get a call how to alert them so that they would answer it. You know at that time and still to this day the HF remains kind of the dominant voice communications technology and there's a thing called CellCal that they try to send alerts to the flight deck, and so we had ringing. You know you could actually call the airplane and get it to ring and then, starting kind of in 91 but culminating in 95, there was a push to bring DataLink to air traffic control and that's where the FANS program came in and I was the DER, the designated engineering representative on behalf of Boeing for the FAA, for both the ACARS and the SACOM, on the FANS program, and I got to go on all the flight tests and kind of witness that it all worked and be kind of the subject matter expert on site.

Peter Lemme: 5:48

So you know that all finished up in June of 1995. And to this day that technology still is around.

Chris Glass: 5:58

So, during those early days, what was it like, working with the different regulators and different groups to make sure that this technology was safe and that it worked? How was that process?

Peter Lemme: 6:11

So we were. You know, initially it was just for ACARS, so it didn't really have a significant operational impact, but still, you want to make sure that you're providing a reliable service. Yeah, you're providing a reliable service. Yeah, I think it was interesting on the voice side. When we first started to test voice, we discovered occasionally we would get dropouts and we didn't even know it. So when you're testing in a lab for SATCOM and you're doing voice, you have to call somebody, and so you would end up calling your wife calling a buddy.

Peter Lemme: 6:45

You have to call somebody and you know, after a while your list of people to call has run out and you don't even know what to talk about anymore. We never noticed a problem, but at some point, as we got down this road of what are we going to say, we would start to like pick up a newspaper and just start reading an article. And when we started to read the article we would start to hear dropouts and it would like this and you didn't. When you're just having a conversation, your brain sort of fills in those gaps and you don't really notice it, but when you're you're reading, you start to really pick it up, and so we started using counts One, two, three, six. Oh, there's a problem.

Peter Lemme: 7:24

There's a problem and we would record it. And we reported the issue to Inmarsat and it was funny, we went to a user's forum sort of like one of these meetings, but just for Inmarsat users and I was on the floor and the issue came up on this and I said, hey, we're having a problem with this and Inmarsat was a little bit. Well, let's talk about that offline, you know, because it's a big meeting we want to do this.

Peter Lemme: 7:54

And I said, well, I have a tape of this, maybe it would be interesting for everyone to hear, kind of what we're experiencing. And well, let's do that offline. But the crowd said let him play his tape, let him play his tape, let him play his tape and so. I played the tape and then there was a lot of silence and uh, and then in Marseille had to, it turned out it was uh, some settings at each ground station had to be tweaked a little bit to make it work.

Peter Lemme: 8:15

But um, yeah, it was. Uh, I think. I think the thing that surprised me was um there's different forums. You know Air Inc forum that we're here at AWC, there's RTCA and then you get into ICAO.

Chris Glass: 8:36

And the.

Peter Lemme: 8:36

Air Inc environment is really a pretty friendly environment. Things kind of move quickly, there's not a lot of things holding you back.

Chris Glass: 8:41

It seems to be very collaborative. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lemme: 8:43

You get to RTCA and, even worse, icao. It's a very charged environment. There's a lot of I don't know what to say, but not nearly as collegiate.

Chris Glass: 8:55

Right.

Peter Lemme: 8:57

And very serious about it, of course, and so I personally didn't really enjoy working in those environments. I chaired an RTCA working group for Satellite Voice and had some fun with that because it was my own, you know, working group.

Chris Glass: 9:10

I could kind of do what I wanted.

Peter Lemme: 9:11

But we would meet in plenary sessions and there would be so much stuff that I didn't care about. So, and ICAO was much worse it was. And then there was regional working groups also, as we were focused mostly in the South Pacific. So by and large, I really enjoy this forum and I've kind of decided this is where I like to be, and so I stayed around this.

Chris Glass: 9:34

Stayed here in this environment more.

Peter Lemme: 9:36

Yeah.

Chris Glass: 9:37

So let's talk about some of the stuff that you're doing now. So that's where you came from, some of the consulting work that you're doing. Let's talk about that.

Peter Lemme: 9:46

Sure, so most of my time is spent with the Seamless Air Alliance. It was formed in 2018. And it was really trying to make it easier for passengers to get their devices connected on board aircraft. As I'm sure you've experienced, when you get on board, you have to figure out what Wi-Fi network is there.

Chris Glass: 10:06

Yeah.

Peter Lemme: 10:06

And then you may not be able to get to the portal. So you've connected to the Wi-Fi, but now what? Nothing seems to be working and you've got to get to a webpage and authorize it.

Peter Lemme: 10:16

And so the seamless air alliance was promoting technology that allows your device to do that attachment for you directly. It still hasn't really caught on and it surprises me that that's the case, but nevertheless the organization has proven to be quite interesting. I'm the thought leader, so I kind of work on all the different groups and help them, and we have a group that looks at personalization, and there's so many things we could be doing and we've kind of figured it out. We have an airline forum where we get half a dozen airlines to sit around and talk about issues they're having with inflight connectivity, and then there's a lot of emphasis on quality of experience. We've spent years now really studying how to measure quality of experience.

Peter Lemme: 11:01

Most people, when they look at a radio link, they say, oh, what's your data rate or what's your latency, as if that's all there is to characterize it. But no network is just a flat line. They always have these peaks and valleys and so you have to actually use it, and so we've been developing measures for specific applications, things like web browsing and streaming, and now we're working on messaging. Things like web browsing and streaming, and now we're working on messaging, and it's been a really interesting road to figure out how to determine how good a network is really providing internet service, and it's nothing to do with bits per second. It's more about how long does it take for a web page to load, or is your streaming, buffering, things like that.

Chris Glass: 11:42

So do you feel that, like I know, starlink entering the market and making internet so much cheaper, do you think that's going to have a huge effect on the industry going forward?

Peter Lemme: 11:56

Yeah, I think there's two things going on there. One is, I think latency is underappreciated.

Chris Glass: 12:01

Yeah, absolutely.

Peter Lemme: 12:03

In the past. When people talk about low latency, they talk about gaming applications and maybe voice applications, but in reality web browsing is really sensitive to latency and I think these low-Earth orbit networks are going to deliver such a better user experience than the geostationary networks that are provided that the market's going to pivot just because of that more than anything else. Starlink from SpaceX, there's Eutelsat's OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, Telesat, Lightspeed and then there's another system from SCS called O3BM Power, and they all have kind of different characteristics. Starlink is very disruptive.

Chris Glass: 12:44

Much like all of his companies tend to be.

Peter Lemme: 12:49

He has not embraced standards and we were all a bit taken aback by the Hawaiian installation having two separate antennas being installed Right. I've been chairing I guess I didn't mention that mention that I was the formative chairman back in 2000, started in 2007, but really got going in 2008 of the KUK band SATCOM subcommittee here at AWC and we've developed airing 791 and 792, and we're working on 793. And that's been a great collaboration between Airbus and Boeing and airlines and service providers. Not to say that everybody's followed it, but it's provided a lot of guidance and it has given the OEMs the Airbus and Boeing a path forward for offering the services and Starlink has basically to this point. They've not embraced any of that.

Peter Lemme: 13:38

And they're kind of just doing it their own way, but everybody else in the market OneWeb is being offered through other service providers. Starlink is direct to the airlines, oneweb is indirect, and so those are existing IFC providers and they're a little bit more on board with what we're trying to do in standards. And I think Starlink is going to come around, because I don't think Boeing and Airbus are going to let Starlink do everything that they are doing right now in retrofit. Do everything that they are doing right now in retrofit.

Chris Glass: 14:04

Yeah, when you have to deal with two big giants like Boeing and Airbus, they have a lot of sway with how things work and how things go on their aircraft.

Peter Lemme: 14:13

It's their rules, it's their sandbox, so you've got to play by the rules.

Chris Glass: 14:17

One thing I've noticed. I'm from Canada and it took us forever to get internet on the aircraft, just simply because of how sparsely populated our country is. We didn't have the same kind of ground towers that you needed. That was kind of covered in the States, so it really took a long time. Do you feel like those companies are going to be able to offer a better product now that you're not necessarily dealing with a ground-based system as much as you used to be?

Peter Lemme: 14:48

Well, I think the I call those line of sight, but a lot of people call them air-to-ground. Air-to-ground or ATG was a GoGo brand name, so I don't, I try not to use it, but the market still uses it. But these are, you know, terrestrial networks, cellular networks, effectively, and pointed up towards the airplane. There was a licensee for Canada that kind of squandered, it didn't really deploy it, but there was a movement to bring it into Canada and I don't think it really developed in the way they thought it would originally, but for sure, outside of the very dense urban environments and land masses, you know, satellites are kind of the answer. Today. There's a thing called non-terrestrial networking and we're involved with that at Seamless, where we're trying to. It's built on this directed device idea where the satellite can talk to your cell phone directly.

Chris Glass: 15:42

Oh, wow.

Peter Lemme: 15:43

And so places like Canada and so forth would really benefit from that. Yeah, Because you know, I live in the state of Washington and, I don't know, maybe 70% of the state's not covered by cellular.

Chris Glass: 15:53

Yeah, it's trees.

Peter Lemme: 15:55

Well, it's even big highways, you know there's big. You might have 30, 40 miles where there's no cell coverage on a major highway, wow, and so I'm really looking forward to that. But that NTN technology is kind of a future thing, that we may sort of see a resurgence of terrestrial networking, cellular and non-terrestrial networking through satellite, kind of converging on the airplane. So it's all in the mix, you know it just keeps getting better. Right, it's all in the mix, you know it just keeps getting better.

Chris Glass: 16:24

Right, I remember I spent 20 years working with WestJet and I remember the heavy investment we made to move towards live television and have the physical TV screens and that was the cutting-edge technology and we thought that was going to last forever.

Chris Glass: 16:43

And then, as soon as tablets and cell phones really exploded with media and content, the the need for that physical screen went away and I'm not sure a lot of airlines saw that move coming until it was a little too late and then they had to pull all those systems off. What do you think is going to be the next disruptive step? I know that's a hard thing to predict, but Internet on board really disrupted the live TV, the physical box on board the aircraft. What do you think is going to be the next disruption?

Peter Lemme: 17:16

Well, I just want to push back a little bit on your proposition that CPAC is on the way out.

Chris Glass: 17:22

Really.

Peter Lemme: 17:22

CPAC display. I think it has a place. It can't be turned off for the most part. So it's a great marketing opportunity for airlines Right For long haul.

Chris Glass: 17:34

You know, for short operations I get it, but for longer operations I think that's where I saw it the most is on that narrow body under three hours. When you're on those longer flights it's a little bit different.

Peter Lemme: 17:48

Yeah, and you can draw from the same movie catalog. You can deliver it wirelessly or through your seat back, so there's no real differentiation. Really, it's more about delivering. I mean, we've been trying to deliver a good internet service for I started in this in 1999, but legitimately it didn't really get going until about 2006 or 2007.

Peter Lemme: 18:10

So we're 15 plus years down the road and we're still not really delivering the experience people want and I think we're just on the crux of moving in that direction and I think the seamless initiatives that I talked about are also forthcoming. And personalization we haven't really built on the opportunities of personalizing. It's not just you can personalize content, you know you can, if I know what movie titles you might like or things like that but it gets to advertising and promotions and brand reinforcement and I think we have just scratched the surface on personalization. So I think you're going to walk on the airplane at some point. Your device is going to connect automatically the airline and whomever else is going to know who you are. They'll know kind of what your you know, desires are.

Chris Glass: 19:00

Right.

Chris Glass: 19:00

And they'll give you an experience that's much more tailored to your needs Right, as opposed to that generic feel that we get now an experience that's much more tailored to your, to your needs, right, as opposed to that generic uh feel that we get now. Uh, I, I think that's going to be a huge game changer too. A couple of podcasts ago, I was talking to a gentleman named lauren sugarman who was heavily involved in the tech sector and he was in the the metaverse space for a little bit and they got to the point where you know, if you saw shoes in the metaverse, you were able to order those and have them delivered to your house. So the future is kind of bold here. Uh, do you feel any of the augmented reality like the uh google glasses, the apple uh eyewear is going to affect the experience as well, and does the industry have a plan for that?

Peter Lemme: 19:46

Well, again, it's been something that they've tried. I was coming to an AWC meeting maybe 10 years ago and Alaska was doing a demonstration. Having to be on the flight I was on, so I had a chance to put on a set of goggles and have that cinema experience and the things I noticed were it was hot.

Peter Lemme: 20:04

You know it was hot, it made me sweat. And then there's a little bit of motion issues that you have to kind of address, because you're in an airplane and you get a little bit confused in your inner ear versus what you're seeing. So I think those are things that have to be accounted for. But you know what a way to kind of divorce yourself from this crowded environment and be on a beach and looking at the sea rolling in or watching a huge movie at high definition. So I think it's interesting. Obviously, you know the costs are very high right now and of course people look kind of silly wearing them too. So that's the other side of it. We have to get used to that.

Chris Glass: 20:49

Yeah, we've got to hit that tipping point where there's enough people wearing them that it's not that silly look anymore. I wonder if we ever get to a point where you know, um, you're an airline let's say, you're a vacation destination airline uh, you know, you put on your augmented reality, uh, whether it be glasses or the full, full garb and you know you're, you're looking at the resort that you're going to and you're able to purchase or buy excursions or have that really personalized service. So has anybody been thinking that far ahead?

Peter Lemme: 21:17

Yes, well, we've been. It's not even that. I mean we've been at Seamless. Probably three years ago we sat down and we figured out every kind of thing you might want to buy or offer to a passenger, and then we figured out what kind of information you needed to have in order to sort of customize that.

Chris Glass: 21:34

Right.

Peter Lemme: 21:36

And it requires a little bit of give and take, and so I think that people have to be willing to sort of play in this game. But if you're traveling to a destination, you already know kind of where you're going to stay. You probably have a car arranged, your flights are already booked, but you don't know where you're going to go for dinner and you're not really sure what you're going to do the next morning.

Chris Glass: 21:58

And you have time on your hands to plan it Exactly. You're sitting there looking for something to do. This is the perfect time to run that kind of embedded commercial, if you will.

Peter Lemme: 22:07

Right, well, and also you know the airline can play a role in this with their partners, and when you go to the hotel, you know you go to the concierge. Or maybe you're out on the street in a street corner and somebody's selling tickets. You don't really know necessarily what you're getting and I think, yeah, it's an opportunity for the airline. And and, by the way, things like, uh, like, if you're traveling with your family, there's there's different things you might want to be doing than if you're in a business meeting, like if you know you're going to be meeting all day. Maybe you're looking for a place to take your client out to dinner a nice, a nice and and maybe the airline's got a good deal and gets you into a restaurant that you could never get into.

Peter Lemme: 22:42

After you land, you could call that restaurant and I'm sorry, we're fully booked, but in flight, maybe the airline's got well, we got a few seats, we can get you there. The same thing if you want to go with your family. Maybe you're looking for a zoo or some sort of excursion, and again, the airline can kind of give you some confidence that what you're buying is going to have good value, and then, if there's something wrong. You've got a big brother to kind of step in and help you out.

Chris Glass: 23:06

So Right, and that gives people the confidence to purchase, like I could just see, you know, like, when you talk about personalization, that's such a fascinating topic because you know, if you're going to, um, let's say, uh, disney world, you know, uh, as a family, or if you're just going to florida as a businessman, the experience is going to be completely different, right, and it's just such a great opportunity for airlines to increase their margins. I mean, this is an industry that, uh, if you're making high single-digit profit margins, that's good and no other industry would ever accept that as a successful business.

Peter Lemme: 23:48

So any way we can increase those margins up and up and up is, I think the average profit ranges from $8 to $15 a flight per passenger.

Peter Lemme: 23:57

And this is where commissions make a big deal, versus the idea of impressions and click-throughs as being a business case. There's not enough money in there to really make a difference, but commissions on sales or bookings or things like that, where you could get $10 or $5 or $20 feedback from that sale, could have a huge impact to the bottom line. We call it ancillary revenue and I think again we've just scratched the surface on that.

Chris Glass: 24:23

And you know, I think of it from a guest point of view or a passenger point of view. This is kind of the way we want to be marketed to right Like we want to have something that's relevant to us, that we can you know what I mean as opposed to the traditional kind of bombard you with do you want this? Do you want that? Do you want this? Do you want that? Like having it tailored to you is great.

Peter Lemme: 24:46

You were talking about linear programming or live television, and I'm still a big fan of linear programming. I've watched and observed that the biggest challenge with in-flight entertainment is figuring out what to watch. Yeah, it's reading the menu and not eating, so to speak. You're, you know, seeing that, seeing that. Well, that movie's crap. I would never watch. That, you know. And you just go through 100.

Peter Lemme: 25:08

But if you have linear feed going and you tune to it and we've all seen this you go into your hotel room and you're just like whatever, turn the TV on and now suddenly you're watching some crazy movie you would have never picked out of, but it's drawing you in and I think so. The thing about that is, when we did live TV generally it was the commercials came with the content. And what a great opportunity if you could work with those content providers to be able to substitute the commercials so that you know when you're watching a title you're getting a certain set of commercials. Maybe it's about cars and maybe for me it's going to be about boats or something like that. But to customize that instead of Clorox bleach or you know things like that, that you know who cares what a wasted opportunity.

Chris Glass: 25:52

Right, and you know, one of the things I'm really looking forward to returning to airlines at some point is live sports and being able to not miss that game when you travel. And so that's one thing I miss about the live television is that you don't get that experience right now, but that has always been traditionally very expensive for airlines to offer. How can we get the cost down on those items in order to kind of offer that immersive experience?

Peter Lemme: 26:22

Yeah, well, obviously how you monetize it is going to be a factor in that if you can monetize it or not. And you're right, sporting events are the number one draw for live programming. From a SATCOM standpoint, when I started we had wide-beam transponders that would cover basically all of the US with one beam Right, and providing live television was easy because everybody was watching the same channels. We've moved to spot beam technology and frequency reuse and so instead of having one beam for the whole continent, you know you might have hundreds or thousands of beams. If you're trying to deliver live television in that framework, you have to repeat that programming in every one of those spot beams and it steals away a lot of the benefit of frequency reuse. So that's kind of keeping the channel mixed down. You can only have a few channels or it gets very expensive.

Chris Glass: 27:15

Yeah.

Peter Lemme: 27:16

But we're kind of on the precipice of multi-beam antennas and as soon as that technology sort of comes to be and we're there, but it's just not really that pervasive yet and you'll be able to point a beam over to a wide-beam satellite and offload that content from your expensive sort of comm network and bring those channels over. And now you could bring in 100 channels of TV with really no significant incremental cost, and I think that's going to be a big change.

Chris Glass: 27:44

That's going to be a game-changer for sure. And then we're back to the Netflix problem of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trying to find something.

Peter Lemme: 27:50

Yeah, but it's a clicker. Yeah, you can do the old-fashioned yeah. Anyway, I do miss the days of scrolling away instead of just looking at titles and trying to figure out what to. I have to say I was doing some tests for a service provider that had a live TV product, and so I'm doing flight testing. I'm sitting in a passenger seat and I'm working on my computer to see how the Internet service is working, but they have live television running.

Peter Lemme: 28:15

So I would put my phone in my pocket and put headphones on, because I couldn't watch both screens, but I could listen to the TV and see if there's dropouts or whatever while I'm doing this work, and they had kind of a you know eclectic set of channels and I'm listening and it's like suddenly, like somebody's putting their hand in a catfish or something. I'm like what is going on? And I have to pull my phone out and see what's actually going on. So even the, you know the, the, the crappiest, uh, and I don't mean that bad, but things that you wouldn't expect to draw you can, can draw you in.

Chris Glass: 28:49

Especially cause you're a captive audience, right, you have nowhere else to go. Um, in the world of social media, I mean, we're a podcast, we're kind of a video blog. You have a blog as well.

Peter Lemme: 29:01

I do.

Chris Glass: 29:01

So let's talk about that, let's talk about Satcom Guru.

Peter Lemme: 29:05

So I've been in the market for a long time.

Chris Glass: 29:07

Right.

Peter Lemme: 29:07

And I feel very strongly about giving back. So I do all my work here at AWC as voluntary. I don't get paid for this. I give my own time to produce these standards and help with it. I give my own time to produce these standards and help with it, and then I discovered that there were a lot of issues that just weren't documented as far as how to understand how aeronautical SATCOM works.

Peter Lemme: 29:28

So I created this blog, satcomguru. I got the URL, so I'm the guru Nice and I started publishing stories about basically technical articles about different aspects of SATCOM, trying to help people sort of appreciate some of the subtleties. I have to say, though, you know, at the end of 2018, with the 737 MAX accident, I used that blog also to document my views on what was going on with the 737. So I spent, you know, about three years in particular really writing a lot of articles about the 737 MAX. So the blog has kind of gone, you know, following my interests. It didn't really follow SATCOM per se, and I haven't written as much recently as I have in the past, but I think it's always there for me to draw down.

Chris Glass: 30:17

Excellent. And the last thing I wanted to ask you about if I understand correctly, you won an award here this week at AMC, so tell me about that.

Peter Lemme: 30:26

Yeah, I was very honored to receive the Velare, which is the AWC award category as a pioneer for DataLincolnSatCom, and I didn't realize that they've only given the award out about a dozen times. I think I'm the 12th person to get it. You know I have this. You know I've been doing that work in Data Lincoln, satcom for about 35 years and so along the way you know I had my accomplishments when I was at Boeing and some stuff that I did with Iridium and I've done some stuff with Cellular and now the work that I've been doing with KUK Band.

Peter Lemme: 31:02

So I had a nice sort of track record to draw from and it was great to be recognized for that and I'm quite honored to have received it.

Chris Glass: 31:11

Well, it's well deserved. Before we hop off, I ask everybody this this is an aviation podcast and travel is such a big part of it. I know you've seen the world in your travels. Where should I go next? So what's? What's your favorite destination out there?

Peter Lemme: 31:32

Wow, I never. I never do good on these types of questions but I actually, I actually kind of like to stay at home. I'm kind of burned out on travel. My wife's about to retire and she's ready to go travel and I'm like, well, I'm not so much and I travel. I have a boat up in the, I take it up in the San Juan Islands. But you know, I spent. I was really fortunate when the 747-400 was introduced. I got to spend two months in New Zealand. I was helping with the introduction of the 400 with Air New Zealand and I found that New Zealand was very much a kindred spirit to what I found very appealing in the Pacific Northwest Right, and so it's kind of one of my favorite places to go and there's a lot to see in both the North Island and the South Island and I recommend, you know, visiting both.

Chris Glass: 32:13

Well, I don't think my wife is going to have a problem with me saying hey, let's go to New Zealand anytime soon. Peter, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. It's been my honor and congratulations on the award and congratulations on such an excellent career and I really appreciate you spending some time with me today.

Peter Lemme: 32:29

All right, well, thanks for having me.

Chris Glass: 32:30

We're going to be back with more great podcasts here on the Jump Seat. Thank you so much and we'll be back from Phoenix Arizona.