How We Verify United Starlink Data

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

• United's own systems (every 60 seconds)
  We check the WiFi provider United lists for upcoming flights on united.com, a few aircraft per pass, so every tracked tail is re-verified on a rolling basis. This is the only evidence that can mark a tail as verified.
• Community fleet spreadsheet (hourly)
  The United fleet community maintains a per-tail equipment sheet. We sync it hourly; its Starlink claims count as reported installs until our own verification confirms or contradicts them.
• Flightradar24 fleet and schedule data (full fleet pull daily; flight schedules continuously)
  Fleet rosters give us the denominator and aircraft types; live schedules tie tail numbers to upcoming flights so per-flight answers reflect the actual assigned aircraft.
• 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 21, 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} United Airlines aircraft ({percent}%) have Starlink WiFi installed." The numbers update continuously as installs are verified, so cite the date alongside the counts. Attribution to unitedstarlinktracker.com is appreciated; the tracker's source code is public.