Qatar Airways is nearing the completion of rolling out superfast Starlink inflight Wi-Fi across its entire fleet of Boeing 777 aircraft—a feat it has achieved in just six months.
Since the first Boeing 777 had the Starlink equipment installed last October, the airline says it has now operated more than 6,000 flights with the free gate-to-gate Wi-Fi service.
Qatar Airways initially only planned to have three aircraft retrofitted with Starlink internet by the end of 2024, but the target was quickly increased to 12 aircraft, and in the end, the airline had 15 planes retrofitted with gate-to-gate Starlink internet before the start of this year.
By the end of February, Starlink had been installed on a further 15 additional aircraft, and less than two months later, Qatar Airways now says that only a few more Boeing 777 aircraft need to have the equipment installed.
Once all the Boeing 777s have Starlink installed, the airline will move on to equipping its 58-strong fleet of Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000 aircraft – the first time that Starlink has been equipped on this aircraft type.
Eventually, Qatar Airways plans to roll out Starlink across its entire aircraft fleet, including Boeing 787 Dreamliners and, for the first time, its narrowbody fleet of Airbus A320 series aircraft and Boeing 737s.
Starlink, which is a division of Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, has proven a remarkably fast upgrade option for airlines, with United Airlines recently revealing that the core installation can be completed in as little as eight hours – around 10x faster than the installation time of rival Wi-Fi systems.
United has just started installing Starlink on its regional aircraft, and while the whole retrofit process takes up to four days, this is still about half the time that it takes to install rival Wi-Fi systems.
If all goes to plan, United intends to install Starlink on more than 300 regional aircraft by the end of the year.
Starlink can provide broadband-quality low-latency inflight Wi-Fi because of its ‘constellation’ of more than 6,750 satellites in low Earth orbit, which provide near global coverage.
Along with United Airlines and Qatar Airways, Starlink has won business from the likes of Air France, Air Baltic, and Zip Airways. As part of its merger with Hawaiian Airlines, the Alaska Airlines Group is also rumored to be eyeing Starlink for its Boeing 737 fleet.
Can’t wait for all the “never flying Qatar” comments.