Airbus has partnered with Delta Air Lines, OneWeb, Sprint, and Bharti Airtel to create Seamless Air Alliance, a new coalition that will provide 5G in-flight internet connectivity.

Seamless Air Alliance aims to help its member mobile operators to offer their services into airline cabins to provide their customers with high-speed, low-latency, satellite-based connectivity.

The service is also expected to significantly reduce costs.

Seamless Air Alliance further intends to eliminate the huge costs and barriers commonly associated with acquisition, installation and operation of data access infrastructure.

“Airbus is committed to innovation that creates value across the aviation industry.”

These goals can be achieved by streamlining system integration and certification, offering open specifications for interoperability, increasing accessibility for passengers, as well as allowing simple and integrated billing.

The alliance invites other industry operators to be a part of the association.

Airbus digital transformation officer Marc Fontaine said: “Easy-to-use, high-speed connectivity is part of the next revolution in aerospace.

“As we showed with our Skywise aviation data platform, Airbus is committed to innovation that creates value across the aviation industry.”

Seamless Air Alliance will be supported by OneWeb’s new constellation of satellites, with the first set scheduled to be launched later this year.

In-flight connectivity service provider Gogo, which currently provides services to Delta Air Lines, is also expected to join the alliance as the latter develops a system to assist both its customers and the entire airline industry.

The alliance is also set to benefit from Sprint’s 5G network, which is due to be launched next year.