Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
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!
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.
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.)
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
This is incredibly interesting, will follow.
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.
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.
I tried Starlink on a United flight the other day (short hop from Hilton Head to DC) and it was amazing.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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-...
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.
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.
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?
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.