Internet on planes is magic, even if it’s broken

Everyone deserves great wifi in the sky when their airplane is equipped with it. We know when your flight’s wifi sucks, and we do our damndest to make sure it doesn’t. I pinky swear.

Fewer than 1% of flights have an actively disrupted connection at any point in time, and less than 0.1% of flights above 10,000 feet have connection disruptions. More on why that altitude matters later.

When your flight’s wifi isn’t working, here’s what’s probably going on.

Inflight wifi is an engineering feat. An antenna on a fast-moving plane must point at an exact spot in the sky… or the connection breaks. It’s like a camel walking through the eye of a needle, an insane carnival game, or that knuckle-clenching manual burn scene in Apollo 13.

Want to see for yourself how hard connecting to a precise spot in the sky is? iPhone owners can try connecting to a satellite from the ground by going to Settings → Messages → Satellite Connection Demo.

Look to the sky

Inflight wifi only works with a clear view of a specific spot in the sky.

If you’re on the ground, a building, a mountain, or something else can block the line of sight between the plane and the satellite. Closing the boarding door will trigger the plane’s wifi network to appear, but the internet won’t work if your plane is waiting to push behind a building.

In the air, the view of the sky improves, but it’s still not always clear. Water, whether it takes the shape of fog, clouds, or rain, makes radio waves scatter, just like it turns the sun’s rays into a rainbow. The higher we get, the clearer the view usually is.

The sun can also blind the view of the sky, just like those times of day where you’re driving and have so much glare you can barely see.

Keeping up with motion

Even with a clear view, the plane’s antenna still has to point at the right spot in the sky. Clever gyroscopic hardware cradles the antenna above our seats and keeps it pointed at that right spot most of the time.

The same kind of hardware keeps your smartphone videos looking steady while you walk, but start running and it’ll lose sight of your subject.

That 10,000-foot altitude number makes a difference because taking off, climbing, and getting ready to land cause disorienting forces. When this happens, the equipment has to recalibrate. The physics of conservation of energy means it can take a few minutes of gentle, level flying to settle back into place and find that magic spot in the sky.

## Too hot to handle

One of the best ways to break electronics is to put them in extreme heat. Take your iPhone outside and keep the screen in full sunlight and you’ll see it complain about overheating.

The spot where a plane’s internet servers live is tiny and they get stifling hot, especially on the ground. The cooler temperatures at cruise altitude are much friendlier.

This wear and tear causes things to eventually break down. A plane could be routed to fly for several days until it reaches a maintenance base that has the right replacement part in stock.

If the plane’s antenna has an issue? That’s sitting at the top. We have to fetch a crane to hoist up a cradle that’s heavier than what most people can bench press. Even though a flight without wifi sucks, we’re pretty sure our customers want to fly more than they want us to cancel a flight so we can fix the internet connection.

The flight attendants

Flight attendants hear and see it all. My besties who fly for Breeze, Delta, Alaska, Air France, and others commiserate with me about rude passengers. Many of those kerfuffles are about the Inflight internet. We have lots of laughs so that we don’t cry about Mister Big Mad sitting in 4A.

So what happens when someone asks a flight attendant to reset the system? Usually… nothing other than waiting for it to self-heal.

That’s not what they’ll say, of course. Most flight attendants know they need to sell their performance to make their day easier. They might do it with an intercom chime, or they might go tap random buttons on their cabin management system screen. They’ll probably wait several minutes to come back to your row telling you that they reset it.

What they will not do is actually turn the system off and on again. That kicks off a ten to twenty-minute boot cycle. That “reset” is a charade. A placebo. Flight attendants usually wait several minutes before coming back to your row because that’s usually the time the system needs to recalibrate and find that magic spot in the sky again.

On many planes, the servers that manage the internet connection also control the seatback screens. A reboot means you’d see everyone’s screen go black. What flight attendant wants to piss off an entire plane full of people right before cabin service?

We actually monitor it and make it better

We know internet in the sky matters. We want internet when we fly, and we know you want it when you fly.

We monitor connectivity on every flight. We observe metrics like the number of devices connected, GB of data served, throughput rates, etc. We know what flights go dark, when, where, and for how long. Millions of sessions going on in the sky all day, every day. It’s impressive.

System engineers at partners like Viasat take these mountains of log data and figure out improvements so that fewer and fewer disruptions happen. Why? Because they want inflight wifi that works too.

It sometimes takes years for their clever improvements to make it to your plane. Many hardware changes must undergo certification from aviation authorities like the FAA and airline engineering departments before we can begin rolling them out one plane at a time.

Get connected

If the internet on your next flight isn’t working when you open the page, pause for a moment. Look outside. You’re flying! Think about the turns you just made in the sky, and the forces of getting pushed into your seat while blasting off from the ground. Imagine the antenna trying to find that magic spot way off in space.

If you’re in the mood, connect with the person sitting next to you for a moment instead of obsessively refreshing your phone browser.

By the time you’ve looked around and noodled through all that, the internet connection will probably be live again. Have a nice flight!

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