Which Airlines Have Starlink Wi-Fi? The Complete August 2026 Guide

An airline announcing Starlink doesn't mean your flight has Starlink. That's the mistake thousands of travelers make every week.

Airlines announce deals. Planes get upgraded one aircraft at a time. Your ticket is for one specific aircraft, not for a press release.

After auditing 235 airlines, I realized there was no easy way to know whether your specific flight would actually have Starlink or an older satellite system. That's why I built FlightWifi, a free Chrome extension that shows flight Wi-Fi quality directly inside Google Flights before you book. This site is the dataset behind it.

The audit reads airline documentation and connectivity-provider announcements first, and falls back to established aviation trade reporting for the minority of carriers that publish nothing about wifi. Every entry says which it rests on. Here is what it holds in August 2026, live from the registry:

The full-coverage club

These are the airlines where you don't need luck: every plane, or every plane of the listed type, has it. Qatar Airways finished its 777, A350 and 787-8 widebodies. airBaltic and ZIPAIR cover their entire fleets, free for everyone with no account. Virgin Atlantic completed all 12 A350s in June, while its 787s and A330s wait for their retrofits on the old paid system.

The coin-toss tier

This is the tier that generates the viral praise and the angry follow-up posts. The system is genuinely flying, on some of the planes. United is at about 522 of 1,817 aircraft, converting dozens more each month. Emirates has 33 Boeing 777s and 3 A380s flying it, on the way to all 232 widebodies by mid-2027. Air France has done most widebodies but only 3 of 28 A320s. On these fleets the honest verdict is the one the extension shows: varies by aircraft.

Signed, celebrated, and not carrying a single passenger

Every airline in the announced tier has a real Starlink contract and nothing in the air. The Lufthansa Group's 850-aircraft deal begins with a single A320neo on 19 August 2026. Korean Air has hardware installed and switched off. flydubai is the cautionary tale: it announced Starlink and removed its old Wi-Fi in the meantime, so today it flies with nothing.

The biggest lie in airline Wi-Fi

Your phone shows full Wi-Fi bars. Your messages do not send.

Because the "Wi-Fi" isn't connected to the internet. It's a movie server. Dozens of airlines advertise onboard Wi-Fi that is a local streaming network: films, a menu, a moving map, and no connection to the ground. easyJet, Transavia, Nok Air, Drukair, Vietjet and many others fall in this bucket today, and aggregator sites list them all as "has Wi-Fi".

Fast without Starlink

Starlink isn't the only low-orbit game. Amazon's Kuiper reaches JetBlue from 2027. Eutelsat OneWeb capacity is already flying in a multi-orbit setup at Avianca, which had 10 A320-family aircraft live as of December 2025. SES's mid-orbit O3b mPOWER already flies at Thai Airways and is coming to Air Astana. And the old guard's high-orbit systems remain perfectly fine for mail and browsing, just not for a video call.

Want to know before you book?

Fleet-level truth does not survive the booking screen. That's why the FlightWifi extension reads the exact aircraft on every Google Flights, Skyscanner and Soar result and shows the verdict inline: video calls work, email and browsing, varies by aircraft, or no Wi-Fi at all.

Method: every claim traces to a source listed on that airline's page, checked airline by airline, with the airline's own publications preferred over anything written about them. The live tables on this page update with the registry, and the full dataset is open. Spotted something that has since changed? Tell me and I'll correct it.