Hey HN, If you’ve been lucky enough to be on a flight with Starlink, you understand the hype. It actually works!
However, its availability on flights is patchy and hard to predict. So we built a database of all airlines that have rolled out Starlink (beyond just a trial), and a flight search tool to predict it. Plug in a flight number and date, and we'll estimate the likelihood of Starlink on-board based on aircraft type and tail number.
If you don’t have any trips coming up, you can also look up specific routes to see what flights offer Starlink. You can find it here: https://stardrift.ai/starlink .
-
I wanted to add a few notes on how this works too. There are three things we check, in order, when we answer a query:
- Does this airline have Starlink?
- Does this aircraft body have Starlink?
- Does this specific aircraft have Starlink?
Only a few airlines at all have Starlink right now: United, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Air France, Qatar, JSX, and a handful of others. So if an aircraft is operated by any other airline, we can issue a blanket no immediately.
Then, we check the actual body that's flying on the plane. Airlines usually publish equipment assignments in advance, and they're also rolling out Starlink body-by-body. So we know, for instance, that all JSX E145s have Starlink and that none of Air France's A320s have Starlink. (You can see a summary of our data at https://stardrift.ai/starlink/fleet-summary, though the live logic has a few rules not encoded there.)
If there's a complete match at the body type level, we can confidently tell you your flight will have Starlink. However, in most cases, the airline has only rolled out a partial upgrade to that aircraft type. In that case, we need to drill down a little more and figure out exactly which plane is flying on your route.
We can do this by looking up the 'tail number' (think of it as a license plate for the plane). Unfortunately, the tail number is usually only assigned a few days before a flight. So, before that, the best we can do is calculate the probability that your plane will be assigned an aircraft with Starlink enabled.
To do this, we had to build a mapping of aircraft tails to Starlink status. Here, I have to thank online airline enthusiasts who maintain meticulous spreadsheets and forum threads to track this data! As I understand it, they usually get this data from airline staff who are enthusiastic about Starlink rollouts, so it's a reliable, frequently updated source. Most of our work was finding each source, normalizing their formats, building a reliable & responsible system to pull them in, and then tying them together with our other data sources.
Basically, it's a data normalization problem! I used to work on financial data systems and I was surprised how similar this problem was.
-
Starlink itself is also a pretty cool technology. I also wrote a blog post (https://stardrift.ai/blog/why-is-starlink-so-good) on why it's so much better than all the other aircraft wifi options out there. At a high level, it's only possible because rocket launches are so cheap nowadays, which is incredibly cool.
The performance is great, so it's well worth planning your flights around it where possible. Right now, your best bet in the US is on United regional flights and JSX/Hawaiian. Internationally, Qatar is the best option (though obviously not right now), with Air France a distance second. This will change throughout the year as more airlines roll it out though, and we'll keep our database updated!
No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.
Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-sc...
I'm surprised he would admit that publicly on a podcast.
One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.
> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this
One word: marketing.
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.
It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think?
Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.
About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.
But you need to give personal information which also has value.
More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?
Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)
The people concerned with that hypothetical can use a VPN.
At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)
But the person sitting next to you can see everything.
Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.
> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free
There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...
What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. You'd expect nothing less from a Musk company. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.
Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.
Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.
I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?
It could just be the ESPN business model. $ from every single customer is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.
> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals
The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)
T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.
give the customers the complete experience and they will subscribe.
IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.
I've only had it once, but inflight Starlink is a game changer. I was able to play a ranked AoE2 game over the Pacific Ocean.
Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for one
You can be disconnected wherever you want, with a bit of self control.
Always a catch.
Not really, personally... time waits for no one.
Well, hells bells, next week I'm actually going to be flying on an Alaska Airlines E175. That's quite rare for me, I can't remember the last time I've flown on one of their small planes. And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink. Sweet! I may have to try it out, even if paying for WiFi on a short flight is generally a waste of money.
Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
> And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink
Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!
I tried Starlink on a United flight the other day (short hop from Hilton Head to DC) and it was amazing.
I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
> The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.
Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
Regional planes are for direct routes to smaller airports, but hub-to-hub flights can be filled up and easily justify larger airplanes.
Big fan. One feature idea/request - a map showing coverage with 0-100% by route (red/yellow/green lines). I’m just curious to see where I should think to look for / expect starlink options. Probing into a few upcoming trips showed basically no coverage.
Oh that's a cool idea! We wanted to do a variant of this, will add it to the list. The tricky part for us is getting a canonical list of all flights + body types on it.
This is awesome! In the past I would use the promise of starlink or other LEO internet as a tiebreaker for booking flights and was disappointed a few times (as clearly not all of the airframes for an airline have the capability)
Neat problem to work on. The tail number lookup is the hard part and it sounds like you solved it the right way, by finding the people who actually track this obsessively rather than trying to scrape it yourself.
Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Great questions!
> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?
These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.
> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.
United has this on some flights. It's no cost but they force you watch ads in the captive portal. I'd rather pay the $8 and be left in peace, every time.
Just an ad one time when you login? That seems fine.
I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.
I wish my bloody commuter train into London had Starlink. Even when the onboard wifi works you are limited to 100mb of traffic.
I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
can always macgyver your own antenna like this guy in Brazil https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/passageiro-causa-polemica-ao-...
Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.
Here’s a hack, get yourself a cheap eSIM data only plan from an alternative UK network (VOXI, Talkmobile etc) if you main network doesn’t have connectivity; they will!
looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?
I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that!
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
SpaceX originally partnered with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb in 2014, then they eventually went their separate ways.
This is incredibly interesting, will follow.
Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters.
Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.
The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.
These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.
That's frustrating. It's possible their link was down for some reason - airline maintenance issues happen all the time. :(
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
It's depressing to see this that even the German Lufthansa is offering this.
Elon musk did a Hilter salute and had a live stream with the German Nazi party afd
Anti democracy behavior should be enough to not support anything that dude is doing but no....
Lots of examples of anti-Elon pols giving nazi salutes and no one cares. People are done pretending that your concerns are genuine. Move on.
My personal comment is part of my view.
Just because you do not care about democracy doesn't give you the right to tell me to move on.
Care to tell me why you, probably making good money, care so little about it?
Because your concern is not real. It wasn't a nazi salute period. You are seeing things. Get your eyes checked.
The fact that you're getting downvoted is a great example of why America is in the state it's in. Personally this tool looks like a useful way of booking a flight without financially funding the rise of fascism.
Mamdani did exactly the same thing I think we should worry more about the mayor doing it than a private citizen.