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.
WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
61–70 of 675 posts
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#62I belive this is OPs flight if anyone wants to compare plane data with ADS-B one. https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2340/history/2023...
That is the flight. This is a cool idea - I wish I had thought of it!
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#63Another 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.
> Specifically, time in this zone is referred to as Pacific Standard Time (PST) when standard time is being observed (early November to mid-March), and Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) when daylight saving time (mid-March to early November) is being observed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Time_Zone#:~:text=Sp....
What do you think is the correct format?
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#64I'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…
How does that fly (pun intended) with regards to net neutrality? Where I live, some mobile operators gave you "unlimited streaming" in their data plan, but only for certain popular services (spotify, youtube, netflix basically). Since this would make it harder for others to disrupt the big ones, it was quickly forbidden.
When the rules were still active, net neutrality did not apply to coffee shops, airlines, etc.
> 52. Finally, we decline to apply our rules directly to coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and other entities when they acquire Internet service from a broadband provider to enable their patrons to access the Internet from their establishments (we refer to these entities as “premise operators”). These services are typically offered by the premise operator as an ancillary benefit to patrons ... Although broadband providers that offer such services are subject to open Internet rules, we note that addressing traffic unwanted by a premise operator is a legitimate network management purpose. [0]
It seems like a reasonable distinction: if you're letting someone else use your Internet connection, it's your prerogative to block things that you don't want on your network.
- [0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-10-201A1.pdf (page 31)
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#65Another 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.
Southwest has international routes now to popular vacation destinations south of the US.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#66Another 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.
> This works because they’re a US-only airline
They're not US-only (note that the response included a value for whether it was a non-US-including flight), but they are North/Central America/Caribbean-only.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#67Thats funny, I discovered the same thing a few months ago and built a CLI flight tracker[1] that uses the API. I'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. [1]: https://github.com/NalinPlad/OuterFlightTracker
That's cool! I had wanted to make something similar, but I didn't have enough experience with making TUIs to build it without using the internet for reference during the flight. I'm glad to that it's been done though!
Yeah, I was on a long flight home from a hackathon with some fellow programmers so it was fun to work on it together
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#68I'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…
How does that fly (pun intended) with regards to net neutrality? Where I live, some mobile operators gave you "unlimited streaming" in their data plan, but only for certain popular services (spotify, youtube, netflix basically). Since this would make it harder for others to disrupt the big ones, it was quickly forbidden.
Other people have suggested it's done by limiting the size of the data transmitted to make the connection only useful to text messages, possibly resetting the connection regularly. If so, it would in fact comply with both the principles of net neutrality and any laws I know of. You could create matsemann's text service as long as it also used small amounts of data it guessed could only be used for text.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#69I want to see someone build a proxy that uses the free iMessage or WhatsApp allowed connection to send arbitrary data. Like have a WhatsApp relay set up at home that you are sending messages to and from, from the plane. 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. Wonder what someo…
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#70I'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 don’t think they have any sophisticated solution for sniffing traffic. It’s most likely simple firewall + deals with Apple/Meta. Many airlines offer basic Wi-Fi for messages nowadays, so it’s very likely that big tech developed solution for it (especially, as they have initiative to do that, so their apps can work).