How We Verify Alaska Starlink Data

No single source is trusted on its own. We combine independent feeds and reconcile them against each other:

• Alaska's own systems (every 90 seconds)
  We check upcoming flights on alaskaair.com to confirm which aircraft is actually operating each flight. For Alaska this observes the equipment type, not a WiFi banner, so per-tail WiFi status is derived from the fleet program state for that type.
• Flightradar24 fleet and schedule data (full fleet pull daily; flight schedules continuously)
  Fleet rosters for Alaska mainline and the Horizon Air regional fleet give us the denominator and aircraft types; live schedules tie tail numbers to upcoming flights.
• Community install reports (checked continuously)
  Frequent-flyer communities track which mainline 737s and 787s have been through the retrofit. We ingest those per-tail reports as claims, never as verified status.
• FAA aircraft registry (daily)
  Registration cross-reference so retired or re-registered airframes drop out of the counts instead of lingering as phantom installs.

Each aircraft carries one of three levels of certainty, and the site treats them differently:

• Verified — we observed the status on the airline's own systems for a flight that aircraft operated.
• Reported — a community source claims the install; the tail counts toward the headline number but stays queued for direct verification.
• Predicted — for flights more than ~2 days out no aircraft is assigned yet, so per-flight answers are probabilities built from historical assignments. Predictions never feed the fleet count.

An hourly consensus pass reconciles the sources. Direct observation outranks community claims: a tail we verify as running a non-Starlink WiFi system is settled negative and removed from the headline count even if a spreadsheet says otherwise.

Verification and schedule jobs run continuously (60–90 second cycles), fleet-level syncs run hourly to daily, and every page renders straight from the live database — there is no publishing delay between a status change and the site. This airline's data was last updated July 20, 2026.

• Aircraft assignments can change up to departure — a swap can put you on a different tail than the one we verified.
• We track aircraft, not seats: no guarantees about connectivity quality or outages on a given flight.
• Install dates record when we first found a tail equipped, which can lag the physical installation by days.

The canonical, quotable form of our headline stat is the dated sentence on the homepage (HTML id starlink-stat): "As of {date}, {n} of {total} Alaska Airlines aircraft ({percent}%) have Starlink WiFi installed." The numbers update continuously as installs are verified, so cite the date alongside the counts. Attribution to alaskastarlinktracker.com is appreciated; the tracker's source code is public.