Just a week after announcing the service was certified, Hawaiian Airlines officially launched its inflight internet era on Thursday. The first flight with the service available to passengers operated from Honolulu to Long Beach, California on N228HA, one of the carrier’s A321neo planes.
In marrying this best-in-class technology with our authentic Hawaiian hospitality, we are offering our guests a travel experience unlike any other airline flying to and from the Hawaiian Islands.
– Chris Liebertz, senior director of engineering at Hawaiian Airlines
As with all other Starlink installations, the service is active gate-to-gate and complimentary to passengers. The company is not promising availability on any flight or aircraft at this point, based on the install progress. Instead, it notes that service will be available on a “surprise and delight” basis while it works to fully fit the fleet.
The implementation takes advantage of the aero terminal developed in-house at Starlink, along with the company’s low earth orbit satellite constellation. And because the flights operate mostly over water, without line-of-sight to ground stations, the data traffic passes between the satellites via laser-based inter-satellite links (ISLs) until they can be transmitted to the ground.
While the first flight with passengers using the service occurred just this week, the company has been flying aircraft equipped with the system for a couple months for testing. This included a special test flight for employees.
“During these tests, employees streamed shows and movies, played video games with friends, downloaded and uploaded large files, worked in real time, and scrolled on social media,” explains Chris Liebertz, senior director of engineering at Hawaiian Airlines. “Each assessment then allowed us to fine-tune the service to the high-performance level for which Starlink is known.”
N228HA was the first aircraft to be activated for passengers, but it was not the first to be equipped. That honor goes to …
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