alt Hacker NewsShow 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 .
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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!
Comments
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...
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.
For God's sake you can take 2-4 hours of not working, right? Just sit and relax, or take an audiobook with you! Or watch a cringy show from 90s. You don't have obligations of sharing #airplane #boeing #starlink #momwithbaby[kl]ickingmyseat every 5 minutes or so
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.
No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.
I tried Starlink on a United flight the other day (short hop from Hilton Head to DC) and it was amazing.
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?
As someone who's really not a fan of fElon (he made Twitter steal my OG username), it's nice to see people misuse the Starlink term, and I hope it would eventually be genericised [1]. ;)
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-...
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.
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 globe doesn't pan to some routes - perhaps ones that cross the international date line? - for example https://stardrift.ai/starlink/search?origin=AKL&dest=LAX&dep...
This is awesome! I just came back from Cancun with my family, and I was on a WestJet flight. I was taken aback by a) free Wifi and b) how fast it was to support everyone streaming YouTube even. Your tracker let me figure out that it was a WestJet flight; now I know that I have to seek out these flights from now on.
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.
People are so rude with their phones that I fear that starlink becomes popular in all flights.
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 matches what I've seen in the data. The correlation between niche specificity and close rate is much stronger than most people expect — generalists trying to compete on price lose even when they win.
Starlink is good I’m sure. But it isn’t the be all end all of high speed internet on planes. Delta doesn’t use Starlink and most of its planes have fast satellite internet except the A900s used for short hops.
I built something similar[0] a while back, Stardrift looks 100x better - nice work!
[0] unitedstarlinktracker.com
Why does it work on the plane? are the constant handoffs between satellites not enough to break connections or cause extremely high packet loss for it to suck?
is there a speed at which it would break?
My trip from USA to Amsterdam doesn't have starlink, at all. Not a single plane. No matter the company.
So sad
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)
Why the .ai domain? Are you using AI in your data pipeline somehow?
It would be great to make this data into a browser extension that overlays the info when using Google Flights
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.
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?
Damn that's so cool I just checked it and it works dayum how far we have come guys
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.
Planes and underground trains are/were focus sanctuaries ...
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.
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good read. thanks for sharing
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Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for one
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.
I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over themselves about Starlink for rural connectivity when it is an incredibly complex and expensive technology with huge ongoing costs that could have been solved once and for all by simply running some wires.