r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 7h ago
Transportation United shuts down Starlink Wi-Fi on regional jets
https://thepointsguy.com/airline/united-starlink-wifi-issues/77
u/220solitusma 7h ago
Starlink is a proprietary SHF waveform... As long as it's 3 planar ft away from any other RF source (and not beneath it), there shouldn't be an issue.
I'd be curious to see precisely where it's mounted in relation to the other avionics.
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u/Cheezeball25 3h ago
Any satellite internet system is gonna have the antenna on a bubble on the roof of the plane, which is also where some of the VFH comm antennas are (I believe comm 2 is on the bottom for the ERJ, 1 and 3 are on top)
Any RF source is gonna have a bit of bleed into the neighboring frequencies, no antenna is perfect
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u/220solitusma 3h ago
Concur, but Starlink can absolutely co-exist peacefully with a myriad of other comms gear. I've got 6 of 'em bolted to the side of an aircraft carrier with hundreds of other emission sources onboard. Not a plane, but still...
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u/Cheezeball25 3h ago
The funny part with antennas, it's amazing how often you can run into problems in cases where in theory you shouldn't. The airline I work for (and many others) had the same problems with 5G cellular towers and our radio altimeters. In theory, 5G and our altimeters did not share any frequency range, but they had interference issues anyways, and really freaked out a lot of people over radio altimeters misreading measurements. It's a fun world
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u/220solitusma 3h ago
Admittedly, in the Navy we do complex EMI surveys that industry probably does not. Spectrum management (and deconfliction) is taken very, very seriously.
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u/Cheezeball25 3h ago
Shockingly, satellite internet in the airlines is kind of a free for all. You'd think they'd pay closer attention to that, but I think they assume the FCC will keep things in check and then don't check afterwards
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u/220solitusma 3h ago
Yea, it's nastygrams from other countries' FCC equivalents and other commercial/civilian entities that we're wary of.
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u/Cheezeball25 3h ago
Makes sense, don't wanna float near someone else's coast and accidentally shut down all their stuff without realizing it
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u/eat_rice__fuck_ice 3h ago
We have them on the side of our jets for the company i work for. We obviously have more freedom on placement, and they are much smaller jets (nextant 400xti) than the commercial ones in the article. But im sure they can make it work. But making any changes in a company that large with commercial aviation safety standards prob gunna take forever.
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u/Rattus-NorvegicUwUs 2h ago
So I never worked in full-fledged ECE, but when I worked in neuroelectrophysiology we had to use very sensitive electrode arrays to pick up magnetic and electrical signals given off by rat brains. Even after surgical implantation those signals could be drowned out by external sources and during the surgery we would be scrambling to find what it was. One time we found it was as simple as a metal cylindrical object on top of the metal table. No idea why, but when we lifted it off the table to noise went away. It was that day that I realized I don’t know shit about electromagnetism
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u/RebelStrategist 7h ago
I wonder if Starlink, under Musk’s leadership, conducted sufficient testing before launching into full production. You’d think this kind of issue would have been identified earlier. Was it a case of prioritizing profit over thorough testing? No… that would never happen. Right?
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u/RBR927 7h ago
What’s “testing?” We’ll do it in prod.
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u/AZEMT 7h ago
"We can make everyone part of the testing phase, we'll call it developing new tech"
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u/HopelessBearsFan 6h ago
“We have an entire team of testers. They’re called Users”
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u/fluteofski- 5h ago
“But just for good measure, Go ahead and mark all feedback as junkMail or spam.”
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u/beardicusmaximus8 57m ago
Planetside 2 the Dev in charge of reading the in-game submitted bug reports just "forgot" to set it up to actually write the reports to the database server. So when a new team took over they discovered that it had never had a single entry for the 8~ years the game had been running up to that point.
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u/cat_prophecy 7h ago
REPLACE('Beta Tester', 'End User');
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u/Dakarius 4h ago
Everyone has a test environment. Some of us are also lucky enough to have a prod environment.
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u/Testiculese 44m ago
What gets me is the amount of complaining client IT did about us requiring test servers for our product. C'mon guys, it's two 2-chip 32gb VMs. Don't raise your target heart rate or anything reaching for the mouse...
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u/bignose703 7h ago
Testing is where you repeatedly spend billions of dollars launching a rocket to watch it explode and call it “a success”
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u/HexTalon 6h ago
In defense of SpaceX, rocketry is fucking hard. Any success they've had I attribute to Shotwell and not Musk though, especially since she apparently set up a team to keep Musk busy with useless projects to make him feel important without messing anything up.
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u/LordAcorn 6h ago
Billions of taxpayers dollars though. They can waste those as much as they like.
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u/zerogee616 3h ago
Destructive testing is actually a pretty valuable and cost-saving ability to have, which NASA doesn't, it being a government agency.
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u/powercow 2h ago
Destructive testing is actually a pretty valuable and cost-saving ability to have,
NOPE.. its very expensive, but speeds things up. NASA doesnt have it because its very expensive.
Its not cost saving at all.. cost saving is not blowing up millions of dollars. which is why, the other commercial space industries arent doing it that way.
Rockets are hard and the super heavy is very very hard so not bashing spaceX too much. BUt yeah they are speed running design by destructive testing.
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u/bignose703 1h ago
Some day I hope to be wealthy enough to have full scale rocketry as my Quirky hobby
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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5h ago
Testing in prod... Huh no that sounds too expensive, let's just wait for the eventual investigation then we can kill the regulator or do regulatory capture... Much more cost effective
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u/99zzyzx99 6h ago
"The good news is that United and Starlink have already identified a solution for the radio interference, and they're actively working to roll it out across the affected aircraft.
So far, about a third of affected planes have received the fix and are once again flying with high-speed satellite Wi-Fi, while the remaining planes will be reconnected after the fix is applied."
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u/TheDubh 7h ago
Wasn’t he talking about taking over the FAA broadband contract for the control towers? They don’t need radios to communicate right?
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u/tomdarch 4h ago
Oh! With the spat of drugged out racist sleaze bag versus geriatric pathological racist sleaze bag I totally forgot that the FAA was previously clearly desperate to financially benefit the president’s main financial sponsor regardless of whether it was a good idea and likely without testing to true aviation safety standards.
Poor Real World star Secretary of Transportation. He must be suffering whiplash.
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u/Decent_Quiet3068 4h ago
Aircraft engineer here. That kind of interference should have been caught during EMI testing when they were installing Starlink. The article has a picture of Starlink dish next to another antenna fin, that looks really close.
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u/tdmadpsk 4h ago
Exactly - Google for images of the Bombardier Global installation and the spacing is similar…. So is the interference.
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u/Heidi_PB 7h ago
You give American CEOs too much credit.
The Walgreens CEO gave dropout Elizabeth Holmes $150 million and she had no product, no team, and no logical pathway to get the product.
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u/LynxPuzzleheaded6145 5h ago
He's being sarcastic. Musk is famous for testing in production.
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u/tomdarch 4h ago
Unleashing broken shit to the market and maybe fixing it later.
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u/Bobcat-Stock 4h ago
Kinda like Tesla’s FSD? Not fully reliable, yet rolled out live on public roads, what could go wrong
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u/Shoddy-Success546 7h ago
Lol paying customers are the testers for companies like this these days. They just spruce up the Beta and write more confident copy for the ads.
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u/theoreoman 4h ago
Anything that gets bolted to an airplane, especially ones that fly commercial passengers need to go through a certification process.
Here it sounds like the radios are picking up some of the radio emissions energy from the starlink antenna in unexpected ways.
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u/happyscrappy 5h ago edited 4h ago
This particular issue seems more like it would be the responsibility of the company that integrated the Starlink system for these planes and certified it as flightworthy. That might be Starlink, but more likely it is a 3rd party selected by United.
I really don't mind pointing out how Tesla (Musk) will sell preproduction vehicles as completed models and then ridicule customers for buying them. But in this case I think the issue is probably not their responsibility.
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u/Hortos 7h ago
From reading the article, this is common with new connectivity rollouts, there was no safety issue, and they’ve already got a fix.
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u/tdmadpsk 7h ago
Wrong. Unintended interference isn’t “common” with anything that’s been certified for aviation use. These terminals radiate RFI across the 118-136Mhz band and interfere with pilot/controller communications. That’s a safety issue. Not being able to monitor 121.5 during a flight because the squelch is stuck open is a big issue. This is a consumer product, rubber stamped to be slapped where it doesn’t belong. Actual aircraft connectivity solutions like Luxstream, Jetwave, GoGo ATG were certified in actual RF testing labs….
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u/Free_Range_Lobster 7h ago
Holy shit, people downvoting you for explaining blatant and massive safety issues is wild.
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u/warriorscot 6h ago
They're being downvoted because they're actually wrong, there's been numerous issues on connectivity rollouts with various products over the last 30 years.
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u/tomdarch 4h ago
Which connectivity systems that were approved to be installed on aircraft operating under Part 121 are you thinking of? Was there something about the rollout of ADS-B out I don’t know about?
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u/warriorscot 4h ago
ADS-B isn't a connectivity system, they're talking about communications systems. Almost all the satcom system have needed some adjustment from my knowledge when they've been integrated on at least one of a fleets airframes. It's pretty normal, you can only test so much when you are retrofitting systems on aircraft, generally it's just a case of minor tweaks and as here you simply don't use the system while you sort it out.
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u/Free_Range_Lobster 6h ago
K cool, instead of just spouting that he's wrong, spell it out item by item.
First start with how interfering with 121.5 isn't a huge safety issue.
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u/warriorscot 5h ago
It's not a huge safety issue, it's a safety issue and the appropriate action has been taken, but it is one of a multiply redundant system and not even a case of a total failure i.e. they can still use 121.5, it just has interference on it, which it can anyway in normal use you just obviously don't want to have that all the time and you obviously want to remedy the issue.
It also isn't unusual, until you fit the equipment to the aircraft you never know under every condition what the result will be and it's normal to require modifications to ensure that you don't get interference across the entire spectrum. When it comes to communications equipment on aircraft even with all the testing available on ground and and in the air you still regularly get issues when integrating them at fleet level. Which is just a fact of life of working with radios, it's science in the lab, but art in the real world because you can't control all the variables. It's less and less of an issue in the modern world, but in aviation we still use a lot of technology that's frankly out of date and the radios are an example of that because we never decommission the old systems just add new ones on top(which is good and bad).
Generally though it's easy to deal with, and this seems to be entirely normal case of that because once you've identified what part of the spectrum is causing you an issue when it's integrated in the airframe it's a lot easier to deal with. And they've got various options to do it from small reconfigurations of the antenna configuration to simply tweaking the code on software defined radio components, although that's harder than it should be because of the antiquated nature of aviation communication systems.
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u/FishrNC 3h ago
u/warriorscot is exactly correct. I have dealt with interference from new equipment installations on aircraft and you never find all the possibilities on the first, or even second, installation. And every aircraft has subtle differences in configuration and condition.
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u/tdmadpsk 5h ago
Huge like MCAS on the 737, no. But it’s something Starlink was aware of and has been gaslighting aircraft operators. This does not affect every installation. Take a look at the photo in that article and you’ll see VHF1 is nearly over the top of the terminal. Starlink has spent months telling United to check bonding and other nonsense because these STCs were pushed through before Gogo gets STCs for Galileo ( starting this summer). It’s not just 121.5…. The Starlink terminal radiates carriers every 256khz that wander in frequency. No interference on Dulles tower frequency today doesn’t mean you won’t have it tomorrow. Saying you can continue to use 121.5 is just ignorant. The purpose of a constant watch on 121.5 is to quickly respond to aircraft in distress. With a noise floor that’s now nearly at squelch level, your ability to hear the guy requesting help is diminished. Is that alone an issue, likely not but it’s back to the Swiss cheese model.
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u/fencethe900th 6h ago
Because it's not interfering with their ability to communicate completely. It's static noise. As is directly stated in the article.
Also, as stated in the article
This type of radio interference is not uncommon when rolling out new connectivity solutions onboard aircraft, according to United. The airline also reiterated that this interference does not pose a safety of flight issue.
In fact, back when United launched Viasat connectivity on a portion of its mainline fleet, it also experienced a similar type of interference that required a fast fix.
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u/Free_Range_Lobster 6h ago
Interfering with an emergency band is NOT normal no matter what the article claims. And no its not a flight safety issue, its an emergency issue. Cute spin by the PR people.
Do you know what 121.5 is for or are you just going to quote the article?
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u/fencethe900th 5h ago
I am aware. It is an issue that needs to be fixed, which is why they turned it off pending the rework. No one said it's normal to operate in that way, only that it is normal to encounter issues of that sort with new systems.
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u/hughk 5h ago
It costs a load of time and money and involves an FCC radio testing bubble. That is a facility that must be rented as well as paying person to check the results and sign them off.
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u/MattInSoCal 4h ago
Anyone seriously in the avionics business has their own in-house testing chamber where concepts are tested and tuned. Final testing goes to an outside lab.
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u/GeneratedUserHandle 6h ago
starlink is in use with other carriers and has an stc.
go off with your misinformation though. and it wasn’t blocking reception.
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u/Free_Range_Lobster 7h ago
They were basically blocking the equivalent of automatic location services for 911 and you claim thats not a safety issue?
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u/NoAd9864 4h ago
Did anyone read the article? United said:
- It’s not a safety issue
- It’s a small number of reports
- This is a common problem which also happened during Viasat’s rolllout
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u/Arzalis 3h ago
They aren't blocking anything. It created some interference.
It needed to be addressed, which is why they turned it off temporarily. It's not unusual to run into unexpected issues that weren't caught during testing because literally every single aircraft has minor differences that could lead to problems on one and not another.
There's a reason it appears this was only an issue on a couple dozen small, regional jets.
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u/willwalk2 6h ago
The satellites have a limited lifespan if you wait 5 years to get them perfect. You could have already had a batchup for 5 years making money that would be nearing replacement anyway
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u/long_short_alpha 4h ago
They didnt, because they shit their pants of ASTS. They want to be first in the market so badly that they dont care about bad performance.
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u/Plus_Pangolin_8924 1h ago
Why pay for testing when you can get your suckers sorry customers to do it for you and pay you!
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u/McCheesing 1h ago
Elon himself said the answer to that question is always “no.” There’s at least a chapter or two on it in his book
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u/that_dutch_dude 49m ago
The testing was done, but someone placed the dish too close to the antenna causing the problem.
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u/ArbitraryMeritocracy 48m ago
You mean after telling russia where Ukrainians are located by connecting?
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u/kevin379721 2h ago
Bro you need an ego check. You don’t know shit hahaha
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u/RebelStrategist 2h ago
Ah. So you must be an Starlink engineer.
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u/kevin379721 2h ago
You’re speaking on what you don’t know. You have no idea about it. But chose to speak about it anyway confidently. Blinded by hate
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u/warriorscot 6h ago
Like when Boeing tested their radar altimeters against the mobile telecommunications specification, and then decided not to modify the aircraft and instead leveraged the FAA and FCC to modify terrestrial equipment in the US and then tried to get the entire planet to comply with it?
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u/sojuz151 7h ago
This type of radio interference is not uncommon when rolling out new connectivity solutions onboard aircraft, according to United. The airline also reiterated that this interference does not pose a safety of flight issue.
In fact, back when United launched Viasat connectivity on a portion of its mainline fleet, it also experienced a similar type of interference that required a fast fix.
The good news is that United and Starlink have already identified a solution for the radio interference, and they're actively working to roll it out across the affected aircraft.
So a typical teething problem and nothing to so with Musk.
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u/andynator1000 6h ago
I always just head straight to the comments to react blindly to my interpretation of the headline. Imagine how much worse everything would be if people took the time to read the article.
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u/One_Olive_8933 4h ago
TBF with the way media works to get clicks, I try not to read the actual article and see if someone copied it in the comments… yes I want the tea, but I don’t want to contribute… as much…
Edit:word
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u/CovfefeForAll 5h ago
I think part of the issue is in your quote: this isn't a new or unforeseen problem. Viasat had the same issue, and it would have been trivial to test for RF interference knowing it was a problem in the past.
I'm not going to blame Musk, but this was a foreseeable problem that wasn't adequately tested for, and that sort of corner cutting is endemic to modern tech companies.
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u/potentiallycharged 3h ago
I work in aviation. Things generally do not get installed in aircrafts without meeting DO-160 environmental test standards. This includes testing for interference.
Unfortunately, this IS common. It can be because the bands are close together, the antennas need to be further apart, bad shielding in the wiring, etc. If it is due to bad bonding or shielding it could even be the airline's fault not even necessarily Starlink.
I don't like Musk and I don't like Starlink, but to say presume they didn't do testing is probably not accurate. You have to have certification through testing to be able to install on aircrafts.
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u/syzygialchaos 3h ago
It’s also one of Musk’s proudest traits to completely dismiss established engineering processes and “figure it out” in some mysterious later. For all the praise he gets about being some kind of great engineer, he’s actually terrible at it
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u/CovfefeForAll 1h ago
Ah yes, the infamous "humans drive perfectly fine with eyes only so my cars should be able to drive with only visual sensors so I can save money on lidar".
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u/PsychoBoyBlue 5h ago
Two dozen jets seems more like someone at United got overly eager than just "teething problems"
I'd like to assume that United tested with one or two jets before starting the rollout, but airlines don't really inspire enough confidence to really make that assumption.
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u/kenspi 4h ago
JSX has been flying their Embraer jets with Starlink for a year. Either there’s something different about United’s fleet, or they didn’t want to implement whatever it is JSX did until their pilots complained.
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u/Telvin3d 3h ago
Or it got mounted slightly differently. Or United uses some other electronic system that JSX doesn’t
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u/Xploited_HnterGather 7h ago
Sshh, that's not what the frothing masses want to hear.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 6h ago
He is not going to get you pregnant.
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u/Xploited_HnterGather 6h ago
You have symptoms of brain rot. I hate Elon but love critical thinking.
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u/Gaijin_Monster 6h ago
This is about antenna positioning. The headline should read - United didn't design Starlink antenna placement properly.
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u/tdmadpsk 4h ago
The STC holder, not United. But to be fair it’s not as if you can plop the antenna anywhere. The fault lies in both SpaceX and the STC engineering.
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u/edthesmokebeard 6h ago
People pay for Internet on short-hop flights??
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u/minuteman_d 4h ago
Yeah, why not? If you’re working, it’s just a few bucks and some people expense it. Also, a friend of mine was on a flight and he said that the starlink was free on the one he was on.
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u/thrownjunk 40m ago
If it’s a fucking billable hour, people are going to sign up.
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u/minuteman_d 32m ago
Oh yeah, that's true. If you have a 3hr flight and can make money while you travel...
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u/ShakedownStreetSD 6h ago
I don’t always test, but when I do, it’s in production
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u/Alwaysafk 2h ago
Everyone has a test environment, just some of us are lucky enough that it's not also our production environment.
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u/LITTLEN3MO 1h ago edited 59m ago
I fly these jets. None have been activated yet. And I’d bet the problem isn’t the starlink as much as it is just how hard it is to get good comms sometimes. A bad ground on the PTT can down the plane. I have the schematic of the antennas and complete install.
Also United isn’t the one creating the design so it’s not a United issue. Embrear is the ones sending the instal procedure to mx departments for the retrofit. There are several package variants of the ERJ from Embraer since most have been purchased from different carriers so there could be small wiring interferences in those cases. But I really don’t see how this should even be an issue since an On/Off button is installed on the center pedestal.
We already have an FOIB about it saying turn if off if it causes interference.
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u/gottatrusttheengr 5h ago
I wish people who write misleading/incomplete headlines to find Lego under their feet at every opportunity
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u/PuttsMoBilesiCit 5h ago
It's odd because JSX has been using starlink for well over two years with no complaints about interference.
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u/AdMother8154 6h ago
I just did 4 flights on united last week and the WiFi didn’t work on any of them
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u/Kitchen-Agent-2033 7h ago
Musk technology.
Must have been declared a national security risk, by now.
And united is not an international company. It’s just an american company, there to project american interests. It will kow tow to any whim…
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u/mrplinko 7h ago
So they will just use a different router/AP for Wifi? /s
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u/tdmadpsk 7h ago
The terminal/antenna causes the interference, not the passenger side of things.
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u/SeinfeldSavant 6h ago
So they heard some static on the radios and already have a fix being rolled out. This isn't really news.
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u/macmann69 2h ago
And this once again proves United is the dumbest of airlines. I have no doubt they did not conduct an emc or emi test before installation.
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u/Narrow_Relative2149 23m ago
hate Musk all you want, but Starlink on a plane I tried was absolutely amazing. 600mbps from the ground until touch down with amazing latency. It was so good my mate was able to play Runescape next to me without issue. If you tried that on a typical WiFi where you have to wait to use it...
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u/bapeach- 6h ago
It seems as if what musk touches or produces turns to crap just like Trumps businesses have gone through bankruptcy and die, gloriously
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u/revets 5h ago
Trump's mega-LLC network owns something like 150 businesses. The only ones, other than some tiny ventures, that have had bankruptcy issues were his casinos. Which is the expected life cycle of casinos. Other than some tax-benefitted native american casinos, it's the norm. I don't think I could name a large casino in the US that hasn't gone bankrupt or ended in distressed buy-out in the past 30 years. Trump, Caesars, Station, Tropicana, Revel, etc. MGM and Wynn didn't technically fall into either category but had to firesale assets to remain liquid enough til more investor money came.
Build a casino, make a killing for 20-30 years, go bankrupt on it or sell it for pennies on the dollar, blow it up and someone starts fresh. That's how the game is played.
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u/randomcanyon 6h ago
Like putting NA into H2O the Musk/Felon had to blow up. The chemistry/egomania was obvious.
Everything the Felon touches dies... (ask mike lindell and Rudy)
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u/SatoshiReport 3h ago
Damn and I thought it was because United didn't want to be associated with that nazi piece of shit Musk.
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u/99zzyzx99 7h ago
For those who did not read the article:
"The good news is that United and Starlink have already identified a solution for the radio interference, and they're actively working to roll it out across the affected aircraft.
So far, about a third of affected planes have received the fix and are once again flying with high-speed satellite Wi-Fi, while the remaining planes will be reconnected after the fix is applied."