Discussion
gpt5: 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.
rayiner: [delayed]
bpodgursky: 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.
light_hue_1: > Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portalsThe airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
SR2Z: T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.
unsupp0rted: [delayed]
Hansenq: 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!
bblcla: > 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?
ellyagg: 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.
bblcla: That's frustrating. It's possible their link was down for some reason - airline maintenance issues happen all the time. :(
caycep: 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?
bblcla: 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.
rootusrootus: 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.
bs7280: 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.
theultdev: Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
andrewcamel: 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.
bblcla: 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.
HPsquared: Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.
elonisaass: 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 afdAnti democracy behavior should be enough to not support anything that dude is doing but no....
carodgers: 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.
kevincox: Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.But you need to give personal information which also has value.
schmookeeg: More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?
kevincox: 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.)
neilsharma425: 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?
bblcla: 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.
elonisaass: 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?
drcongo: 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.
SilentEditor: This is incredibly interesting, will follow.
phonon: SpaceX originally partnered with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb in 2014, then they eventually went their separate ways.https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218
supertrope: It could just be the ESPN business model. $ from every single customer is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.
tjoff: Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.
