American Airlines In Talks To Replace ViaSat With Amazon’s New Low Earth Orbit WiFi — But Flyers May Wait Until 2028

Back in September I revealed that JetBlue was planning to move to Amazon’s new satellite wifi service that was promising to compete with – and even exceed the performance of – Starlink. But it was going to take awhile for the system to be commercially operational. JetBlue announced this plan shortly afterward.

Now it appears that American Airlines is talking with Amazon about new wifi service as well.

• American, for a long time, had the best-performing wifi in the U.S. airline industry. But they charged a premium for it.
  
• Other carriers like Delta caught up, moving over to ViaSat service.
  
• And Delta joined JetBlue in pricing wifi at $0. Southwest wifi is now free. So American is moving to free next month.
  
• But Alaska and United are moving to Starlink, which vastly outperforms ViaSat. And when wifi is free usage spikes, and ViaSat really drags.

American today outperforms Delta wifi, for a fee, but performance will degrade when wifi becomes free. American needs to stay competitive with United, which will offer free Starlink. That service isn’t just fast – there’s effectively no latency. It is the same or better than connecting online from the ground. So they’re in talks with Amazon about replacing ViaSat with something better.

“While there’s Starlink, there are other low-Earth-orbit satellite opportunities that we can look at,” [CEO Robert Isom] said.

American has talked with Amazon, Isom added, but he declined to comment on the status of any discussions.

“We’re making sure that American is going to have what our customers need,” he said.

Amazon renamed ‘Project Kuiper’ to Amazon Leo last month. With their next launch on December 15, they expect to have 180 satellites in orbit. Their FCC authorization requires them to launch and operate 50% of their authorized satellites by July 30, 2026, and the remainder by July 30, 2029.

• They are authorized for 3,236 satellites
  
• 50% by July is 1,618 satellites
  
• They’d need to launch more than 6 satellites per day to hit that milestone.
  
• However Jeff Bezos has become friendlier with the Trump administration so presumably this could be renegotiated, but that just pushes out when the service is viable in commrecial use.

JetBlue is targeting the first inalls in 2027. It’s unclear whether American would do a full retrofit, or when they’d target for Amazon’s service. But we could see a limited trial in 2027 at the earliest. That would suggest we don’t see anything at meaningful scale until 2028 or 2029.

Still, it’s exciting because Starlink is several orders of magnitude better than anything else in service today. And Amazon Leo is a low earth orbit system like Starlink’s. It’s important that American is thinking about what’s next, even if it’s far off. They’re not settling for the product they have today, which will match Delta (but not United, Alaska).

However, Starlink is a product that works today, is certified and isn’t still theoretical. So I’d rather see a Starlink deal happen and aggressive rollout there.

(HT: @crucker)