A New York Times technology reporter just made one of the boldest predictions in recent memory about SpaceX's Starlink — and it came from 35,000 feet. Kevin Roose, who covers tech for the NYT, admitted he was a skeptic before boarding a Starlink-equipped aircraft. One flight later, he was calling it a future candidate for the biggest company in the world.
The 200+ Mbps figure Roose cited isn't an outlier. According to Ookla's Q1 2025 report, Starlink-powered flights recorded median download speeds of 152 Mbps, with half of all Starlink-serviced airlines exceeding 300 Mbps in the second half of 2025. Starlink's own Aviation plans advertise peak downloads up to 450 Mbps — numbers that would embarrass most home broadband connections, let alone what passengers have tolerated in the air for decades.
The airline rollout is accelerating fast. United Airlines has outfitted over 300 regional jets with Starlink as of early 2026. Southwest expects its fleet upgrades to wrap by end of 2026. American Airlines announced in May 2026 that it plans to install Starlink on more than 500 Airbus narrowbody aircraft, with installations starting in Q1 2027. Alaska Airlines, Qatar Airways, Air France, and several others have also struck deals. The network effect is building: the more routes go live, the more passengers experience what converted Roose from skeptic to believer in a single flight.
That conversion story is arguably more significant than any speed benchmark. Roose writes for a mainstream audience — not aerospace enthusiasts or SpaceX followers. When someone in that position goes from dismissive to calling something a world-defining business after one firsthand experience, it signals that Starlink Aviation has crossed from impressive-on-paper to genuinely impossible-to-ignore. The next few years of airline installations will put that experience in front of hundreds of millions of passengers who have never heard of a Starlink terminal.
Sources & reporting notes
The links below identify the material source records used for this report.
- @SawyerMerritt on X (2026-06-06T20:58:16.000Z) — Direct source
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