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 .
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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.
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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!
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...
Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.
By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.
One word: marketing.
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.
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.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?
Or see T-Mobile away
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.
The article is online.
The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
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...
IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.
There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
Ok? You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.
Does not sound too bad once you have seen the number of drivers scrolling their phones while driving lately.
Would you look at someone reading a book and be like "it's so disturbing that people are this addicted"? Is something Internet connected really that different?
(That said these days I'm thrilled if there is power on a flight.)
Do you understand?
I use the internet more than I'd like, and I agree that the lack of wifi (on a long international flight) can be a really nice experience.
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?
> 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.
As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.
Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.
I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.
Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.
If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.
So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.
The most effective in rural areas is generally a combination. Fiber to a central location and wifi radio out to customers. I am monitoring a property on the west coast connected via such a setup. The last relay is actually solar powered atop an island.
Radio technology is truly the closes thing to black magic. I wish there were more places to learn and read outside of an EE degree
Again*.
In some ways we did subsidize the initial public phone network that put ma bell in the position to take over as an Internet backbone as "the Internet" became a thing. In some ways we're subsidizing starlink like direct grants of taxpayer sourced funding for rural broadband expansion and contracts that subsidize the spacex launches.
I do wonder sometimes if it's actually cheaper to connect a rural farm to the Internet by blasting a satellite into space vs setting up some kind of terrestrial radio based network like lora or microwave. That's not my knowledge area so maybe there are real, unsolvable issues that prevent terrestrial radio as a solution, but I have to assume blasting rockets into orbit is expensive both short term and long term, especially considering space trash.
In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives.
In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events.
So not only do you get the same market dynamics but practical limitations too and an externalization of costs.
How much global warming and environmental destruction is caused by launching rockets? A grid is built once and can be maintained for a very long time at a much smaller operating cost. Space stuff is expensive...
Elon is a busted flush. He promises the world, delivers somewhat less, somewhat late, if at all. And then layers it with deeply unpleasant politics.
Not groupthink, a sane reaction. Belated, but sane.
It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.
We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.
Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.
Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.
> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.
People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.
The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.
If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.
In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.
There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).
It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.
By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).
Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.
And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.
Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.
But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?
Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.
In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment.
Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).
Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.
> simply running wires
Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.
I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
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!
Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
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!
Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!
Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.
Oh, this one is very doable and makes sense! We track this internally anyway so it's just a matter of surfacing it on the fleet information.
The proper term should be Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, and there are other providers like Amazon [2] and Panasonic Avionics [3] that I hope other airlines would do business with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
[3] https://www.panasonic.aero/blog/blog-post/what-is-low-earth-...
Neither Panasonic nor Amazon Leo (yuck) are operational.
Eutelsat OneWeb is.
is there a speed at which it would break?
Honestly that wasn’t intuitive in my head but makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.
Meanwhile on the train 30 miles from London, nothing.
At least on my android, you could set the second esim as a "backup" that it would switch to for data if the main one lost connection (it took a few seconds, so it wasn't an "always connected" experience, probably because the phone wants to save power)
Lots of options if you search for "esim UK all networks".
And the clusterfuck when I tried to transition my account back to normal, where an $8 balance that wasn't reconciled triggered the suspension of my AT&T whole family account, but when I tried to pay, no-one in FirstNet support or AT&T could tell me how much to pay or where or my account number (and this is in the store), until a poor store and a poor phone CSR spent THREE HOURS getting it resolved. "I am literally trying to give you the money to take care of this." "We don't know where to have you pay that money to fix this."
I was an early adopter, but FML.
I was introduced to it by another HN poster: https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/three-500gb-preloaded-5g-da...
You can clearly see the tech had an older history at SpaceX pre acquisition
2004
I believe they also signed up a teledesic exec Larry Williams around the same time
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
There were article claiming "$8b profit" but relabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA only tells you that Starlink makes money on a satellite once it is already in space and connected to a user. It deletes the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing, and just about all other substantial expenses. Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.
The fact a Starlink satellite only has a < 5 year lifetime and ~2 starlink sats burn up in the atmosphere every single day is entirely left out as well.
They have never been profitable in any real sense. But that's okay, because their real goal is backed by Uncle Sam: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)
Now in 2026, SpaceX is the frontrunner for the Golden Dome, which is an SDI reboot.
The company was always about Wars not Mars.
I do remember DC-X, mostly as when I was a kid, that program coincided with when the web became popular, and I remember (hopefully somewhat accurately) downloaded jpeg/gif files from NASA publicity releases of that rocket over my 2400 bps modem
Such a cynical take! Starlink made Golden Dome possible. It is easy to make up conspiracies post-hoc while forgetting that they were ridiculed when they announced it and the "experts" opined that it is impossible to do.
> SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI
This is highly unfounded speculation. Griffin went to work for "In-Q-Tel" after SpaceX was already founded (as said in the link you cited). There is no evidence I could find that they ever invested in SpaceX.
The existence of cheap launch and cheap satellites allowed the (at the time new) Space Force to pivot from large, expensive monolithic satellites to a "proliferated architecture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency#Launc...) at a much lower cost.
So sad
[0] unitedstarlinktracker.com
Would it be hard to produce a pie chart showing top 10 airports with most starlink planes arriving/departing?
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.
The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.
Planes are just about the least pleasant space to experience involuntary offline-ness. (That said, people scrolling reels with the speaker on (or the display at brightness levels making me consider sunscreen) should immediately go on the no-fly list.)
My ~4 weeks were some of the most memorable of my life
I don't even watch movies or read.
