Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

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.

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'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.

Even when flying intercontinental for many hours, I usually just pull a Puddy on flights and do nothing. I have my laptop with me, of course, but I usually leave it just in the overhead compartment.

I don't even watch movies or read.

No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.

Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for 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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.

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?

This is incredibly interesting, will follow.

I had access to it on a long-haul AirFrance flight. While I avoid doom-scrolling in my daily life because there's better stuff to do... on a long haul flight it's a surprisingly good way to pass time intermittently. I still just watched pre-downloaded dropout for 80% of the flight but when I was too tired to appreciate it I'd turn my brain off and watch a bit of that wonderful doom-scroll slop.

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.

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.

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....