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!
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.
I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.
Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.
People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
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.
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...
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.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
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.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere
Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?
So, worth it?
Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.
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.
Or see T-Mobile away
Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
But you need to give personal information which also has value.
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.
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...
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.
There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.
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.
I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
0. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
https://labri.org/
My ~4 weeks were some of the most memorable of my life
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.)
And the assumption that this view was drawn from nostalgia is completely invalid.
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.
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".
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
https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218
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.
The article claiming "$8b profit" is relabeling EBITDA. EBITDA only tells you that Starlink makes money on a satellite once it is already in space and connected to a user. It hides the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing, and just about all other substantial expenses.
The fact a Starlink satellite only has a < 5 year lifetime and ~2 burn up in the atmosphere every single day is entirely left out as well.
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.
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?
I am absolutely not, and I refuse to spend any money on anything even remotely connected to Elon thanks to his actions. His nazi salutes go far beyond anything even vaguely acceptable in a public figure like him, as someone who lost family in the holocaust I don't find this "funny" or "a mistake" as some people put it. The other day someone was trying to convince me that it was some kind of heartfelt "from the heart" gesture - I've never seen someone so delusional.
Feel free to stick fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and pretend that people don't care about this or that this wasn't a nazi salute - but Musk is exactly who he is, nothing more nothing less.
I don't even watch movies or read.