Hawaiian Airlines today became the first major airline to announce an agreement with Starlink to provide complimentary high-speed, low-latency broadband internet access to every guest onboard flights between the islands and the continental U.S, Asia and Oceania. Hawai‘i’s largest and longest-serving carrier will equip its Airbus A330 and A321neo aircraft, as well as an incoming fleet of Boeing 787-9s, with Starlink’s industry-leading satellite internet connectivity service.
Hawaiian and Starlink are in the initial stages of implementation and expect to begin installing the product on select aircraft next year. Hawaiian is not currently planning to deploy the service on its Boeing 717 aircraft that operate short flights between the Hawaiian Islands.
In 2021, Elon Musk tweeted about offering global maritime service for Starlink in mid-2022.
It seems inevitable that Starlink will be usable on all planes, trains, automobiles and ships by about 2024-2025.
Should work everywhere for global maritime by roughly middle of next year (enough sats with laser links launched). Until then, it will be patchy when far from land.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2021
SOURCES- Hawaiian Air, Space, Spacex, Elon Twitter
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Brian, are you aware of AST Spacemobile? They are sticking large pahsed array satellites in LEO so that you can use a normal mobile phone with them, rather than SpaceX's approach of smaller satellites in LEO connecting to a $500 phased array starlink dish on earth. AST could be about to eat SpaceX's lunch.
Wow, those aircraft certifications must be really coming along. They really originally testing on 5 aircraft types (including Gulfstreams, like Musk flies on). JSX flies Embrarers, and now A330 and A321neo and 787-9's via Hawaiian Air. THough those latter three are ocean long haul.
I wonder if cattle car airlines like Southwest, EasyJet, and RyanAir, which are famous for nickel and diming you, will do that with their 737's…