Methodology

The registry covers 235 airlines with 668 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 668 sources in the registry today, 267 are airline or provider publications, 289 are trade or news reporting, and 112 are weaker still: enthusiast blogs, reference works and pages we have not been able to classify. 50 airlines carry no primary source at all, and 13 rest on those weaker sources alone. Every source on an airline page is labelled with which kind it is, so the thinnest entries are visible rather than dressed up.

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 2026-09) 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.