WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

When my son was younger - maybe 9 or 10 or so, we were on a plane and he was using his phone and I looked over his shoulder and realized he was on the internet... but I hadn&#x27;t paid for an internet plan. I said, &quot;son, how are you using the internet?&quot; He said, &quot;oh, a kid at school showed me - if you go here&quot; (he opened up the wifi settings where the DHCP assigned IP address is) &quot;and start changing the numbers, eventually the internet will work.&quot; Apparently, at the time, on American Airlines, when somebody bought and paid for an internet plan, it gave them an IP address and authorized it to use the internet... if somebody else guessed your IP address (which was pretty easy, it was a 192.168 address) and spoofed it, they could take over your internet connection with no further authorization.<p>I had to tell him not to do that, but I was kind of proud of him for having the temerity to go for it.

“According to this data, the plane’s altitude was only fluctuating by about 20-30 feet. This is more stable than I expected!”<p>Autopilots are very good and they are servoing to the pressure altitude.<p>Many pressure altitude encoders used in modern aircraft (for example to drive altitudes that transponders report to SSR radar or via ADS-B) have 25 ft encoding resolution. That 25ft resolution is likely what is being seen here. Other encoders have 10 ft resolution but 25 ft is very common.

Thats funny, I discovered the same thing a few months ago and built a CLI flight tracker[1] that uses the API. I&#x27;ve tried it across a couple of airlines and it worked almost perfectly across all of them, because they were all using the same in flight ISP.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NalinPlad&#x2F;OuterFlightTracker">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NalinPlad&#x2F;OuterFlightTracker</a>

Here is how to get the equivalent data on a Delta flight.<p><pre><code> $ curl https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wifi.delta.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;flight-data | jq % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 448 100 448 0 0 5600 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 5743 { &quot;timestamp&quot;: &quot;2023-07-11T14:54:41Z&quot;, &quot;eta&quot;: &quot;17:48&quot;, &quot;flightDuration&quot;: 278, &quot;flightNumber&quot;: &quot;DAL786&quot;, &quot;latitude&quot;: 39.723472595214844, &quot;longitude&quot;: -97.1514205932617, &quot;noseId&quot;: &quot;3879&quot;, &quot;paState&quot;: false, &quot;vehicleId&quot;: &quot;N879DN&quot;, &quot;destination&quot;: &quot;KPDX&quot;, &quot;origin&quot;: &quot;KATL&quot;, &quot;flightId&quot;: &quot;N879DN_SF_20230711121358&quot;, &quot;airspeed&quot;: null, &quot;airTemperature&quot;: 24, &quot;altitude&quot;: 33922, &quot;distanceToGo&quot;: 179, &quot;doorState&quot;: &quot;Closed&quot;, &quot;groundspeed&quot;: 442, &quot;heading&quot;: -73, &quot;timeToGo&quot;: 174, &quot;wheelWeightState&quot;: &quot;Off&quot; } </code></pre> And a fun snippet for you.<p><pre><code> $ curl -s https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wifi.delta.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;flight-data | jq -r &#x27;&quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.google.com&#x2F;?q=&quot;, .latitude, &quot;,&quot;, .longitude&#x27; | tr -d &#x27;\n&#x27;; echo https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.google.com&#x2F;?q=40.5615234375,-101.2824478149414</code></pre>

I want to see someone build a proxy that uses the free iMessage or WhatsApp allowed connection to send arbitrary data.<p>Like have a WhatsApp relay set up at home that you are sending messages to and from, from the plane.<p>Like at a most basic level, send a message of a URL to your home WhatsApp which loads the web page there, and sends the HTML back as a WhatApp message reply so you can render it etc.<p>Wonder what someone could all do and make work.<p><i>edit</i> Guess someone made a TCP relay using WhatApp already, neat.

But SouthWest will give you a much prettier display of that same data (track your flight, see the current altitude and ETA, and a lot more, like the plane&#x27;s position on the map) without paying for their WiFi. My guess is that they are using the same data that article writer wrote a program to process. Essentially there is one site you can visit for free and that&#x27;s where it is.

Love the spirit of this article. The author could have Git-scraped [0] this info!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;2020&#x2F;Oct&#x2F;9&#x2F;git-scraping&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simonwillison.net&#x2F;2020&#x2F;Oct&#x2F;9&#x2F;git-scraping&#x2F;</a>

I was just thinking that you could take a picture from the window and then tie the GPS coordinates to the image with the output from that JSON. Kind of handy.

I belive this is OPs flight if anyone wants to compare plane data with ADS-B one.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightaware.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;flight&#x2F;SWA2340&#x2F;history&#x2F;20230924&#x2F;2030Z&#x2F;KSTL&#x2F;KOAK" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightaware.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;flight&#x2F;SWA2340&#x2F;history&#x2F;2023...</a>

Fun story =)<p>Anyone else freaked out by that &quot;time&quot; format though? Seems like a strange choice, would have expected something more standard like ISO 8601 with timezone offset. &quot;time&quot;: &quot;Sun Sep 24 22:02:19 2023&quot;

Wait, doesn&#x27;t everybody set up a prometheus&#x2F;grafana dashboard for each flight to show the telemetry?

When I don&#x27;t have internet and nothing else to do, I&#x27;ll spend the entire flight trying to get free internet

Reminds me of the time I dumped CANbus data off a Yamaha R1 bike, made sense of the data, and displayed it on a bunch of charts.<p>Interesting data like Accelerator Handle position, you can figure out how much a rider is really cranking it, and how aggressive they are riding.

This is why I love hacker news. I was sitting in the waiting area at Long Beach Airport about to board a Southwest flight when I read this article. Did the hack, it worked spectacularly. I didn&#x27;t have jq installed, but whipped up a python script with &#x27;import json&#x27;, watched the data stream the whole flight. Thanks a million for posting this!

If you travel lite with clothes in a book bag(wash clothes if extended stay)… I don&#x27;t see why anyone would fly United, Southwest, American Airlines, etc VS.the budget Airlines like Spirit.<p>Maybe if you have points with those airlines… Otherwise, save hundreds of dollars using budget airlines which the planes are newer in my experience, and never had a bad experience versus my recent bad experiences with Delta and the others in which I paid a lot more for. Almost all airlines I&#x27;ve had to pay for Internet access, including Spirit so for me, I don&#x27;t understand why I would fly all the more expensive airlines versus using Spirit.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of negative marketing out there about Spirit… After my 10 positive flights experiences in the last six months with them I don&#x27;t believe the hype.

On redeye international flights with exorbitant WiFi fees I&#x27;ll admit to scanning for MAC addresses, get the top talkers, then come back later when ones been idle for like 15 minutes, presuming the person is asleep and change my mac to take the address and get online.<p>I just did it for fun, ok fine.

Glad someone looked into the flight tracker, I was always curious how real the data in it is.<p>Although it doesn&#x27;t answer my curiosity about how they manage to mess it up occasionally. I&#x27;ve had flight data from different flights pop up a few times on Southwest, which is never reassuring to see.

I&#x27;m an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free &quot;messaging&quot; plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images&#x2F;attachments from coming through on those platforms.<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol&#x2F;wrapper to send data that looks like it&#x27;s being sent over those protocols, but offers access to other parts of the internet.

I&#x27;ve always wanted to bring a lil router like a GL.iNet, pay for internet, then share it free for everyone on the plane hehe

Reminds me how old and unsecure those system used to be, years ago they would perform DNS queries but block most traffic, meaning that you could get free internet by using DNS tunneling.<p>Same for the movies on board, if they have some apps and not just movies in front seat, you can use vlc, ffmpeg to download &#x2F; watch the movie without ads &#x2F; interruption.<p>When I was doing some digging they used a lot of Panasonic solution and open source stuff such as squid cache, apache http.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na.panasonic.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;industries&#x2F;avionics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na.panasonic.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;industries&#x2F;avionics</a>

Ah, interesting. I guess this could be used by UnifiedNLP: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;packages&#x2F;de.sorunome.unifiednlp.trains&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;packages&#x2F;de.sorunome.unifiednlp.train...</a><p>Also, KDE Itinerary: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invent.kde.org&#x2F;pim&#x2F;itinerary&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;app&#x2F;SettingsPage.qml#L194" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invent.kde.org&#x2F;pim&#x2F;itinerary&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;app&#x2F;S...</a><p>I&#x27;m off pinging the relevant projects :)

I just took two delta flights in the US. The first had free Wifi through Tmobile. It marginally worked. It was just fast enough to view low-intensity websites and I was able to connect to my linux servers back home.

I&#x27;ve done something similar on trains in the UK before, specifically LNER (was Virgin Trains East Coast at the time but don&#x27;t think the Wi-Fi solution has changed) trains. The icomera captive portal has an endpoint which returns the GPS coordinates of the train along with the speed. And some other endpoints for next stops etc.<p>Once made a little React app that showed the train on a Leaflet map. Was a good waste of a few hours.

Fun fact: I used to work for a company that provided equipment and services for satcom. The price tier and license for airborne communication was higher and we had software calculating the speed and if the speed went over 300 m&#x2F;hr or alike it will check your license features and expiration date. If you forgot to pay your bill, no wifi for ya! We did not use altitude for obvious reasons.

I remember doing something similar on a flight until a flight attendant, very confused, asked me how I had all of the graphs from the flight deck on my laptop.<p>Was a funny conversation, especially giving Panasonic (who made the inflight flight tracker) exposes way more data on their API than I could get in the airline’s provided view.

I did something similar on an easyJet flight, I wrote a little Python script to save the altitude and speed data from the free WiFi. They have a cool 3D WebGL rendering of the plane in the air like Flight Simulator, but the satellite imagery was really low res.

I have to wonder if some eager LEO would try to find some illegality in this, especially given all of the federal laws around aircraft. Obviously it&#x27;s innocuous, but I&#x27;d think twice about writing about this kind of tinkering for that reason.

The `ac` in `actime24` probably means `arrival city`.

For those not in (I presume) the US, &quot;Southwest&quot; appears to be the name of an airline. I was disappointed to find out this wasn&#x27;t a puzzle to solve when only travelling in a specific direction, but still an interesting read.

Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flightradar24.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flightradar24.com</a>

Yes, that&#x27;s standard data which is broadcasted to the passengers via the plane app&#x2F;website. Usually the apps will have some &quot;show position&quot; feature where you can see position, speed, altitude, ETA, etc.

In this fragment here:<p><pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; This looks like info about the system&#x27;s satellite internet connection. &quot;sat_commlink_portal&quot;: { &#x2F;&#x2F; The connection is okay! &quot;status&quot;: &quot;conn_ok&quot;, &#x2F;&#x2F; I&#x27;m not sure what this time is. &#x2F;&#x2F; It hasn&#x27;t changed at all. &quot;time&quot;: &quot;Sun Sep 24 22:02:19 2023&quot; </code></pre> The &quot;time&quot; field could be the timestamp of when the status field last changed. That&#x27;s the most obvious thought anyway. :)

This is just the raw data from the in-flight GUI. Is that it? What am I missing?

Almost a duplicate, but actually not: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37692832">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37692832</a>

Read this post while traveling on an ICE train. I decided to see if there was something similar in DB WiFi - and it turns out you can get two json files with current trip data. Here&#x27;s a graph of the train speed for the last hour of my trip:<p><pre><code> km&#x2F;h ice train speed 160 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | + + + + + ** + | |* ** | 140 |*+ ** +-| |* ** | |* ** | 120 |*+ ** +-| | * * * | | * * * | 100 |-* * * +-| | * * * * | 80 |-* ** ** * ** +-| | * ** *** * * | | * ** * ** | 60 |-+* * ** * ** +-| | * **** * ** * ** | | * * * * * * * | 40 |-+ ****** * **** ** * * +-| | ***** * **** * ** | | * * * * ** | 20 |-+ * * * * ** +-| | * * * * ** | | + * * * + + + *+ * + | 0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 count</code></pre>

Pretty sure all these hacks and tips for getting free Wi-Fi aren&#x27;t actually very legal. Sure the chances of getting caught are small, but you are also stealing connectivity someone else paid for by spoofing their mac address. Something, something, mucking about with an airliner even if its just the wifi could probably be twisted into some sort of federal aviation offense too.

When I was 13, I got a modem, and I would frequently call MeritNet lines to see how far I could get on the locked-down Lynx browser without a login, not having access to type in any addresses myself.<p>If I managed to get on an interesting page before I was eventually booted off, I won.<p>Tided me over until I actually got to use an ISP.

I have a similar program I run that does this stuff for United flights: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ejcx&#x2F;uwc&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;uwc.go">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ejcx&#x2F;uwc&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;uwc.go</a><p>The code is horrendous but it has worked for years and I guess when I wrote it originally I didn&#x27;t want to use a go struct for some reason?

You can also get an SDR (a $50 RTL-SDR will do) and listen to your own plane&#x27;s ADS-B signal. For visualization you can use tar1090. Private Flightradar24.<p>With the same SDR you can also listen to the ATC comms, as well as see ACARS messages. It&#x27;s a bit tedious to listen to ATC and your own pilots, but you&#x27;ll know exactly why your plane is delayed.

I added flight status on airlines I fly into my shell prompt from the wifi status. It’s surprisingly fun. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;mitsuhiko&#x2F;status&#x2F;866601971565944832?s=46&amp;t=xvVku2nNB5qI0ZzjVKuITw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;mitsuhiko&#x2F;status&#x2F;866601971565944832?s=46&amp;t=xvV...</a>

The speed unit looks more like knots than mph.

Nice trick with the watch to download periodic: watch -n 30 &quot;curl <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getconnected.southwestwifi.com&#x2F;current.json" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getconnected.southwestwifi.com&#x2F;current.json</a> | jq -c &gt;&gt; flight-logs&quot;<p>I often use crontab, but this looks easier for testing. Thanks.

Love this kind of stuff.

Fun fact: ZeroTier works in most cases on in-flight wifi without logging in. I guess they usually allow UDP.

We messed around on a recent KLM flight and what&#x27;s interesting is that you get a DNS prefix of klm.com in DHCP (or some ms extension of it). The gateway has a name of www that allows you to access www.klm.com even though no name servers are accessible so DNS shouldn&#x27;t work.

On many United flights you can connect to onboard wifi without buying the plan and have internet access on port 22 and apparently unrestricted UDP. This allows me to connect to an EC2 instance running mosh. Coding in vim is a great way to pass the time on a flight.

Fun read! Reminds me of the type of articles I would find in 2600. The hacker spirit at work :)

On one of the earlier flights with wifi, I found that my Google docs were saving correctly even though I didn&#x27;t pay for the wifi upcharge. The router wasn&#x27;t blocking those ports. It seems like this has changed recently. Too bad.

Bring a Stratus, Sentry or open source equivalent with and you can get that data for most other aircraft within line of site in real-time, along with weather, radar, pilot reports and more.

What browser or extension has Copy as cURL and all those other functions?

I was expecting an article about a LAN party aboard a flight.

I remember the days when I poked around like that too, and go to 128.65.70.1 and find the Hughes admin interface for the satellite link itself.

Airlines have a moving map on their captive wifi portals. Didn’t know it was rendered client side though. Something to try when I next fly.

This is fun. I used to build these REST APIs for airlines (not Southwest though). Fun to see them get some attention!

I remember when buying wifi on a plane was sooooo forbidden by my parents. Now i literally buy wifi on every flight lol

Anyone else halfway through reading, already thinking this would be a great way to end up on a TSA watchlist?

What did you use to create your graphics?

I have an American Airlines flight in a few hours. Looking forward to see what kind of data I can find now

Thank you for sharing this story. That motivated me to write mine down:<p>WiFi without internet on a Marabu flight <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marx.wtf&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;wifi-without-internet-on-a-marabu-flight&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marx.wtf&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;wifi-without-internet-on-a-marab...</a>

WiFi with internet if you use a DNS VPN, they are handy and cost you nothing to use

What software did you use to do the visuals? I want to try this out.

&gt; I didn’t know what I’d do with the data at this point, but I started collecting it right away so that I’d have as much as possible to play with later.<p>And people complain that everything everywhere collects data on everyone.

Why don&#x27;t all the images load in Firefox?

does anyone think the marginal cost of internet in flight may drop to free? It&#x27;s already commonly rolled up in J class seats.

Just make sure to never send a PATCH request

actime24 is possibly for Arrival City time, not aircraft time.<p>Fun research!

this is such a wholesome nerd post. i love it.

What a waste of time

fun!

What happened to the notion that the internet should be free and open?

Did you have permission to do that ? Sounds pretty risky to be probing the network of a flight imo.

Another thing to notice: they use the highly nonstandard time zone abbreviation “PDT”. This works because they’re a US-only airline but if an international airline did this, they’d be in for a world of hurt.

It is just 8 bucks for the full service... just buy the internet bro. It is actually pretty good.