TAMPA, Fla. — Hawaiian Airlines announced Sept. 24 the start of free Starlink Wi-Fi on most of its transpacific fleet flying to and from Hawaii.
The company said it has finished installing antennas for SpaceX’s low Earth orbit (LEO) network across the 42 Airbus aircraft in its fleet — 24 A330s and 18 A321Neos — after debuting the broadband service early this year on the airline’s first connected flight.
Marissa Villegas, a spokesperson for the airline, said the company plans to connect its two Boeing 787-9 planes to Starlink, and 10 more 787-9s on order to arrive by 2027, over the coming years but did not include details.
Hawaiian does not plan to bring inflight connectivity to the smaller 19 Boeing 717 planes in its fleet, used for short-range, high-frequency trips throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
The company was the first major airline to announce a deal with Starlink in April 2022 for a service it touts as indistinguishable from low-latency internet access at home.
While Starlink has since won a handful of similar deals with small airlines and business jet providers, the company landed its next major aviation deal Sept. 13 with plans to connect more than 1,000 planes in United Airlines’ international fleet.
Expansion mode
Nick Galano, director of Starlink sales and partnerships and its head of aviation, said the company had around 2,500 aircraft under contract Sept. 17 during World Satellite Business Week in Paris.
Starlink’s network currently has around 300 terabits per second of capacity, Galano added, which continues to increase amid SpaceX’s aggressive constellation launch schedule.
This is “probably over 100 times what all the legacy systems have provided,” he told the conference, opening up new use cases and applications to the entire aircraft.
Previously, he said airlines had to monitor how many people were using the capacity and for what applications.
“Now that constraint is gone,” he said.
According to astrophysicist and space watcher Jonathan McDowell, more than 6,400 Starlink satellites are currently in orbit.
While Galano said Starlink equipment can now be installed on an aircraft in less than a day, he called for more standardization to streamline and accelerate a certification process that is holding back deployments.
LEO diversity
Hawaiian Airlines recently completed its $1.9 billion sale to Alaska Airlines, a larger carrier in the middle of upgrading planes with enhanced connectivity services from Starlink aviation competitor Intelsat.
Intelsat provides inflight connectivity from its fleet of geostationary satellites and capacity leased from Eutelsat’s OneWeb LEO network.
Starlink and Intelsat will be the satellite connectivity partners for the combined fleet, Villegas said via email, adding: “We are actively evaluating options for future fleet growth and evolution of our inflight WiFi.”
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