How WillItWiFi works

WillItWiFi answers one question: will the flight I'm about to take have working internet? No login. No booking funnel. Just a probability you can act on, with full reasoning behind it.

The five signals we combine

Every flight score is built by stacking five sources of evidence — ranked from weakest to strongest:

1. Airline policy: a curated database of 46+ carriers describing whether Wi-Fi is fleet-wide, long-haul-only, rolling out, or absent. Sourced from official airline pages and updated periodically.
2. Aircraft type install rate: a curated database of 55+ aircraft types with their global Wi-Fi installation percentage (e.g. Boeing 787 ~95%, ATR 72 ~5%).
3. Live flight data: when available, we query a flight data API (AeroDataBox) for the actual aircraft type and registration assigned to your flight. Confirmed aircraft data carries far more weight than airline policy alone.
4. Community ratings: travellers rate flights 1–5 stars after flying. When a flight has 3+ ratings, the community signal starts blending into the score; at 10+ ratings, it dominates.
5. Date proximity: aircraft assignments more than 14 days out can change. We lower confidence accordingly.

Prediction quality tiers

Every result is labelled with one of these tiers so you instantly know how serious the estimate is:

• Traveller-confirmed: enough community ratings exist to drive the score directly.
• Tail-confirmed: aircraft registration is known — highest possible algorithmic precision.
• Aircraft-type estimate: aircraft type confirmed by live flight data; type-level install rate informs the score.
• Aircraft-hint estimate: aircraft type provided by you (less verified than live data).
• Policy-based estimate: only airline-level data available; widest uncertainty.

Why we show confidence, not certainty

Aircraft swap. Antennas fail. Free Wi-Fi tiers throttle video. A confident yes/no would be lying. Every result has:

• Probability (0–100%) — how likely Wi-Fi works.
• Confidence (Low/Medium/High) — how solid the underlying signals are.
• Quality tier — what kind of evidence drove the result.
• Reasoning — every input that shaped the score, listed plainly.
• Caveats — what could change before departure.

What community ratings capture

After a flight, travellers can rate the Wi-Fi 1–5 stars and optionally share:

• Whether it was free or paid (and rough price band)
• Speed (none / slow / OK / fast)
• What it was usable for (messaging, browsing, streaming, video calls, VPN)
• Provider (Starlink, Viasat, Panasonic, Inmarsat, Gogo, Anuvu)
• Optional comment + first name + auto-detected country

We never require an account, never ask for an email, and never sell anything. Each device can rate a flight only once. We hide the community average until ≥3 ratings exist for a flight, to avoid misleading single-rating bias.

Where we explicitly don't help

• We can't guarantee Wi-Fi — only estimate probability.
• We don't yet display historical aircraft assignment patterns per flight number (coming).
• For routes without a live schedule API, we don't know which carriers operate the route — we only show airline rankings as a rough geographic hint.
• Wi-Fi installed ≠ Wi-Fi working. Live failures happen and only community ratings catch them.
• We treat business-class free Wi-Fi the same as economy paid Wi-Fi — we don't yet differentiate by cabin.

Help us improve

After your flight, take 30 seconds to rate it. User ratings are how we move from "airline policy says yes" to "this exact aircraft delivered Wi-Fi last week". If your airline isn't covered, the rating still helps — we add airlines based on demand.

Independence

WillItWiFi is independently built. We are not affiliated with any airline, alliance, satellite provider, or booking platform. No airline pays us to surface a higher score.