Starlink in the sky: the revolution that keeps being announced

Every so often, an airline sends me an email breathless with excitement: my upcoming flight has Starlink installed, and I should prepare to be amazed. And in fairness, you should. When you actually get it, satellite internet in the sky is one of those rare pieces of travel technology that lives up to its own press release. Proper speeds, everywhere, even over oceans where connectivity used to go to die. I've been using it on Qatar Airways since they began fitting it to their planes years ago, and it genuinely changed how practical it is to work on a long-haul flight. Not just because the internet works, but because on Qatar it comes with Sport 24, which means live, direct access to whatever is happening in world sport while you're in the air, which for obvious reasons is quite important to me. Premier League, cricket, F1, NFL: if it's on somewhere, it's on above the Atlantic too. For someone in my line of work, and I suspect for most of my clients, that's not a perk, it's the whole point.

Which brings me to the problem, and it's not the technology. It's the gap between the announcement and the aircraft.

The industry pattern has become familiar. An airline signs with Starlink. A magnificent press release follows, with renders and superlatives and a rollout programme. Marketing does its work. And then... not a lot. Qatar aside (they have genuinely delivered across their flagship fleet), a glut of carriers are currently living off the announcement rather than the installation.

Take the UK's transatlantic pair, both of whom have made great marketing play of their Starlink futures. I fly Virgin and BA extensively. This past year alone my routes have included Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas and San Francisco, several of them multiple times, and I have personally yet to sit on a single aircraft with Starlink installed. Not once. Beyond my own seats, we book a lot of flights for clients at Elite Sports Travel and often get emails related to the flights, so I see a decent cross-section of what's actually happening. In the whole of this year, precisely one email has arrived from either carrier inviting me to be excited about Starlink on "my" upcoming flight. It has genuinely been long enough that I'd started to forget how good it is, helped along by the legacy systems I connect to instead, with their dreadful speeds, patchy coverage, and charges that would make a hotel minibar blush. Paying handsomely for internet that barely loads an email is one of long-haul travel's last great insults, and it persists precisely because we've all been trained to expect it.

Then, this summer, an unexpected surprise: a domestic United hop from Orlando to Houston, and there it was. Starlink, working beautifully, on a routine internal flight. US domestic wifi connectivity is decent anyway (and sometimes free too), Delta especially, but this was something else, and the effect of encountering it again after so long was like rediscovering communications all over again. Which is the point, really. The revolution exists. It's flying. It's just flying far too rarely.

Why so slow? I can only speculate, but the shape of it isn't hard to see. Fitting an aircraft costs money and, more expensively still, real downtime; every plane in the hangar is a plane not earning. And the commercial terms reportedly leave little room for airlines to make money from the service itself, which blunts the incentive to hurry. It's hard to rush an installation programme where beyond the marketing noise about being first to market, the actual implementation is costly. I have some sympathy. But only some, because from the consumer's side of the seat, this is the most transformative thing airlines can do to win business from their competitors, especially in the corporate marketplace. Free and fast internet on board is no longer a pipe-dream, and when it becomes widespread on a carrier's fleet, not only will I actively choose to fly on those planes, but we'll be booking our clients onto them too. The carriers who treat it as a customer experience investment rather than a grudge purchase will be the ones who win out.