Methodology

The registry covers 235 airlines with 650 source citations. Its rules are simple and strict, because a wrong verdict on a page like this costs someone a working day at 35,000 feet.

Where a claim comes from

A claim enters the registry from an airline's own pages and press releases, or from its connectivity provider's announcements (SpaceX, Viasat, Panasonic, Intelsat, SES, Anuvu, SITA). Those come first and outrank everything else.

Some airlines publish nothing about wifi at all. For those, established aviation trade reporting is used rather than leaving the entry blank, and the airline's page says so in place of claiming an official source it does not have. Of 650 sources in the registry today, 221 are airline or provider publications and 429 are trade reporting; 77 airlines rest on trade reporting alone.

Aggregator wifi guides and user reports are not sources: they are where the errors we correct come from.

In service beats announced

An announced deal never changes a verdict. Until a system carries passengers, the registry keeps reporting what actually flies today. This single rule is why our Starlink table disagrees with most others, and why it is right when they are not.

Per-aircraft rules

Airlines retrofit type by type and tail by tail, so each entry holds rules per aircraft type. When a type is genuinely split, the verdict says varies by aircraft rather than guessing. When we cannot verify, the verdict is not verified, never an estimate.

No speed numbers

Throughput depends on load and is not a property of a flight, so we never print megabits. Latency class is a property of the system's orbit, which is why verdicts are framed around what works: video calls on low orbit, email and browsing on high orbit.

Freshness

Every entry carries an as-of date (currently 2026-08) and entries with moving rollouts are flagged for re-verification. Corrections are welcome and acted on: open an issue with a source and the registry changes.

Open data

The full registry is published at /data.json under CC BY 4.0. Cite it with a link back. The same file ships inside the extension, so this site and the chips can never disagree.