CHICAGO — United Airlines has started adding Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service to provide Wi-Fi on its flights, the company announced Friday.
United has installed Starlink on its first regional plane and expects to equip more than 300 aircraft by the end of the year.
Free to United mileage members, the service will eventually be available on all United planes, making it the largest carrier globally to offer Starlink. United currently operates about 1,000 aircraft and is the world’s largest airline.
Qatar Airways and Hawaiian Airlines also use Starlink on their aircraft. Air France plans to begin offering it this year.
“Our ability to roll-out this innovative service with unprecedented speed and scale is a direct result of the advanced equipment, technology and team of experts at United,” the airline’s vice president of digital technology, Grant Milstead, said in a statement.
Internet service on airplanes is inconsistent across carriers, with some offering it at a premium, others providing it for free and still others not offering it at all. When it is available, service is often slow and unreliable.
United says its Starlink-equipped planes will have Wi-Fi speeds of up to 250 megabits per second, which it says is 50 times faster than the internet on its current regional planes.
Since rolling outs its satellite-based internet service in 2019, Starlink has signed up more than 4 million customers. A subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, it uses over 7,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit to provide broadband.
The United announcement comes two days after SpaceX wrote on X that it is working with the Federal Aviation Administration “to identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.” The discussion comes as Musk is working in the Trump administration to eliminate waste and fraud in government spending.
The new Starlink Wi-Fi service on United will allow live streaming of TV shows and movies without buffering, United says. It will also allow users to play games live on streaming services, to download and upload documents in real time, and to shop online.
Starlink will be available on travelers’ personal devices as well as their seatback screens.
