Emirates Airline has won the World's Best Airline Inflight Entertainment 2005 category in the World Airline Awards, just announced by Skytrax Research of London.

The award was based on the annual Airline Inflight Entertainment (IFE) Survey conducted by Skytrax between June 2004 and May 2005. This included more than one million survey responses from over 85 nationalities.

The IFE poll was part of the world's largest airline passenger survey, executed by Skytrax, which received a total of more than 12 million responses.

Emirates was also declared first in the Best Airline - Middle East and Best Regional Airline - Middle East and Africa categories.

The IFE survey measured each airline's inflight entertainment on different aspects of passenger satisfaction - overall quality, selection of movies, including choice of languages, video and audio programmes, games and other interactive options and the quality of headsets. Emirates continues to enhance the inflight entertainment offering, as it does in every aspect of its operations, a spokesman said. In December 2003, Emirates was the first airline in the world to broadcast live BBC news headlines to its fleet of aircraft - with regular updates transmitted during the flight. Wi-Fi connectivity on the Airbus A340-500 was launched in May 2004, allowing passengers with Wi-Fi equipped laptops to check their e-mail inflight.

The latest inflight entertainment system, called Ice, for information, entertainment and communications, features over 500 channels of entertainment all controllable by the passenger on demand.

Emirates currently operates three direct weekly flights from Dubai to Malta on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays using Boeing 777-300 aircraft instead of the usual Airbus 330-200 until September.