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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

41–50 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#41

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…

Time to implement IP over FB Messenger

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#43
post #38

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.

PDT is extremely standard?

http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/zoneinfo.tzc?s=defa...

Granted, I think everything should always be a UTC offset, but I'm also weird.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#44

The speed unit looks more like knots than mph.

Good catch! I'm not very familiar with knots - what specifically makes the speeds here look like knots to you? edit: Updated the article. Thanks!

Knots are typically used for aviation. Also different planes have their own optimal speeds for efficiency that the airlines aim for so if you know the airframe you can derive what they are most likely targeting. You can also compare the value to the filed flight plan and see if it is similar.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#45
post #6

Glad someone looked into the flight tracker, I was always curious how real the data in it is. Although it doesn't answer my curiosity about how they manage to mess it up occasionally. I've had flight data from different flights pop up a few times on Southwest, which is never reassuring to see.

If it's the panasonic inflight system, it receives flight data from the FMS. If the system does not receive flight data from the FMS then it will not be up to date. Your browser could also be retrieving old cached content. Basically there is nothing about this system to assure you, it's entirely a secondary data-delayed system that is not critical to flight operations and as such can be INOP at anytime and no one wil…

I honestly miss having to debug the racks at pana. But there were so many "what" level bugs with the systems.

I remember DRM breaking multiple times for the IFE because they assigned the same IP to multiple devices.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#46
post #6

Glad someone looked into the flight tracker, I was always curious how real the data in it is. Although it doesn't answer my curiosity about how they manage to mess it up occasionally. I've had flight data from different flights pop up a few times on Southwest, which is never reassuring to see.

If it's the panasonic inflight system, it receives flight data from the FMS. If the system does not receive flight data from the FMS then it will not be up to date. Your browser could also be retrieving old cached content. Basically there is nothing about this system to assure you, it's entirely a secondary data-delayed system that is not critical to flight operations and as such can be INOP at anytime and no one wil…

> Your browser could also be retrieving old cached content.

No, these are flights I couldn't physically have been on. Sometimes it is old content, but it's for the flight the plane took previously and doesn't update.

Here's an example of it happening to someone else: https://community.southwest.com/t5/Inflight-Experience/Fligh...

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#47

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…

On my recent United flight, where they had the same policy I was sending image messages to friends through Signal. But it was rather slow, so my best guess is rate limiting.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#48

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…

I always assumed they have a whitelist of iMessage/Whatsapp/whatever IP addresses. It doesn't seem to work for all messaging apps in general.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#49

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…

SNI or IP lists.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good catch! I'm not very familiar with knots - what specifically makes the speeds here look like knots to you? edit: Updated the article. Thanks!

Airline planes never use mph but only knots.

That makes sense.

One reason I think it could be MPH despite that is because some of the other data seems like it's been processed so that it doesn't need to be transformed any further on the client side before using it in the UI, and the UI displays the speed in MPH.

If I were still on the flight, I could just compare the numbers in these payloads to the MPH number in the UI and confirm.

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