Hey HN, If you’ve been lucky enough to be on a flight with Starlink, you understand the hype. It actually works!However, its availability on flights is patchy and hard to predict. So we built a database of all airlines that have rolled out Starlink (beyond just a trial), and a flight search tool to predict it. Plug in a flight number and date, and we'll estimate the likelihood of Starlink on-board based on aircraft type and tail number.If you don’t have any trips coming up, you can also look up specific routes to see what flights offer Starlink. You can find it here: https://stardrift.ai/starlink .-I wanted to add a few notes on how this works too. There are three things we check, in order, when we answer a query:- Does this airline have Starlink?- Does this aircraft body have Starlink?- Does this specific aircraft have Starlink?Only a few airlines at all have Starlink right now: United, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Air France, Qatar, JSX, and a handful of others. So if an aircraft is operated by any other airline, we can issue a blanket no immediately.Then, we check the actual body that's flying on the plane. Airlines usually publish equipment assignments in advance, and they're also rolling out Starlink body-by-body. So we know, for instance, that all JSX E145s have Starlink and that none of Air France's A320s have Starlink. (You can see a summary of our data at https://stardrift.ai/starlink/fleet-summary, though the live logic has a few rules not encoded there.)If there's a complete match at the body type level, we can confidently tell you your flight will have Starlink. However, in most cases, the airline has only rolled out a partial upgrade to that aircraft type. In that case, we need to drill down a little more and figure out exactly which plane is flying on your route.We can do this by looking up the 'tail number' (think of it as a license plate for the plane). Unfortunately, the tail number is usua
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
5
competitors found, emerging market, funded players
Trend
No signal yet
A flight prediction tool for Starlink availability that addresses real user frustration but faces strong competition from free alternatives and significant data complexity.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
Questions about this idea?
FlyBot reads the scoring and gives you a second opinion on “Will my flight have Starlink?”.
Risks
Next steps
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
A clear, annoying problem for travelers exists, but a direct free competitor is already in the market, making monetization challenging. The technical difficulty of reliably acquiring and maintaining tail number data for prediction is high for a solo builder.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
While the underlying market for in-flight Starlink is growing, the viability of a paid prediction service with clear differentiation and strong pricing power is weak, especially given existing free tools and high data complexity.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Clear problem for a broad audience, but significant complexity for a solo builder in data acquisition and a challenging monetization path against free competitors.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
While the audience is clear and the value proposition straightforward, the business model is highly challenged by free alternatives and the risk of commoditization or integration by incumbents.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
The demand for Starlink information is real, and the current alternatives are imperfect, but the long-term viability of a dedicated prediction tool is questionable as Starlink becomes ubiquitous.
Why this verdict
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
This weekend
Who is already there, emerging market
StarlinkFlights.com provides real-time predictions for Starlink WiFi availability across 202 airlines and thousands of routes.
Pricing: Free
A flight search tool that predicts the likelihood of Starlink on board a specific flight based on aircraft type and tail number.
Pricing: Not explicitly stated, but the 'Show HN' post implies free access.
FlightAware is an all-purpose flight tracker that provides live flight status, tracking, and airport information.
Pricing: Free to download (ad-supported) with premium subscriptions available.
FlightRadar24 offers global coverage for live flight tracking with a polished interface and various filtering options.
Pricing: Not explicitly stated, but typically offers free basic tracking with paid premium features.
This tool tracks live satellite positions from Starlink, GPS, and other constellations with an interactive 3D globe visualization.
Pricing: Free
What they charge
Recent news
British Airways Begins Starlink Wi-Fi Rollout with Boeing 787 Fleet
Drive Tesla, March 19 2026
British Expat Builds Free Global Starlink Flight Tracker After Frustrating WiFi Experiences
vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com, March 06 2026
Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
Hacker News, March 20 2026
The Sky-High Internet Revolution: How to Check If Your Flight Has Starlink (And Why It Matters for Developers)
DEV Community, March 19 2026
British Airways Launches Free Starlink Wi-Fi, First in UK Skies
Businessday NG, March 20 2026
Market signals
The market for in-flight Starlink availability prediction is a growing niche within the larger in-flight connectivity (IFC) market. Starlink is rapidly expanding its presence in commercial and business aviation, with projections suggesting it could connect over 10,000 aircraft by the end of 2034, acquiring a 39% market share in commercial aviation alone. This growth is fueled by increasing demand for high-speed, low-latency internet on flights, driven by passengers who expect seamless connectivity for work and leisure. Airlines are increasingly adopting Starlink, and some are even offering it for free to passengers, a significant shift from traditional paid models.
What frustrates people
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Hi HN!I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
AI
### Describe the project you are working on Godot C# bindings ### Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project For the past weeks, I've been discussing with several Unity users intending to move to Godot C# regarding dealing with the C# garbage collector. The most common complaint I hear from users is that, in Unity, allocations can trigger unexpected GC spikes into the game. In Godot, we target to make all of the high performance APIs (those that intended to be called every frame) not allocate any memory, so theoretically the GC should not be a problem. Additionally, Godot starting from 4.0, uses the Microsoft CoreCLR version of .net, which also supposedly has a better garbage collector than Unity. But in all, after several discussions with Unity users, neither is enough reassurance for them, and they would really feel safer if Godot exposed a zero allocation API. ### Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation The idea of this proposal is that Godot exposes zero allocation versions of many functions in the C# API, that users can use if they desire. Technically, this could be done from the binding generator itself, without breaking compatibility, and without doing any modification to Godot itself. ### Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams **WARNING** I am not familiar with C#, so take this as pseudocode. Imagine you have two functions exposed as to C#: ```C# void MyClass.SetArray( Vector2[] array); Vector2[] MyClass.GetArray(); ``` This works and is pretty and intuitive. However, it has two problems: * GC is allocated on return * Memory is copied to Godot native formats every time there is a call. The idea is to add NoAlloc versions, which can be generated directly by the binder automatically when required: ```C# void MyClass.SetArrayNoAlloc( Godot.Collections.PackedVector2Array array); void MyCl
AI