Gogo Business Aviation is racing against a tight timeline to upgrade approximately 2,400 aircraft still operating on its legacy air-to-ground network before service ends in early 2026. During the 2025 AEA Convention in Phoenix last week, Dave Salvador, v-p of aftermarket sales at Gogo, discussed the company’s multi-pronged approach to transitioning these aircraft.
“The original air-to-ground network for Gogo has been in service for more than 14 years,” Salvador told AIN. “That network, the cellular technology that’s on there, we’re transitioning it from what they call EVDO to LTE.”
Customers have several upgrade paths available. “Those upgrades can be accomplished through moving from the legacy systems to the Avance L3 or Avance L5,” Salvador explained. “We also have the opportunity for someone to provision for the 5G product with an L5 and the 5G antennas, and then of course Galileo,” the company's low-earth-orbit satcom product.
Gogo’s 5G service, which has been in development for several years, is approaching key milestones. “We are in the final chip fabrication for the 5G chip that is expected to finish at the end of the second quarter,” Salvador said. “From there, we will start taking those chips and putting them in the hardware, which we already have PMA’d with a 4G chip, doing our final testing with the network, and then starting to deliver the production 5G hardware at the end of this year.”
Parts manufacturer approval (PMA) for the Galileo HDX antenna was announced this month. The electronically steered antenna connects to Gogo’s Avance system and operates on Eutelsat OneWeb’s low-earth-orbit satellite constellation.
“That gives us the ability now to move into shipping a production product, which first will be to finish the STCs that we have already in motion—there’s more than 30 of those,” Salvador noted. “For us, that launches into a new category of connectivity that our company has not had before, being a global low-earth-orbit solution.”
With 2,400 aircraft requiring upgrades over the remaining months of 2025, installation rates would need to average at least eight aircraft per day, raising questions about both equipment availability and installation capacity across the MRO network.
Salvador also highlighted Gogo’s recent acquisition of Satcom Direct, describing it as “very pivotal as we continue to go out and compete and offer global solutions” in the business aviation connectivity market.