Lufthansa Group adding Starlink WiFi on flights from August

The Lufthansa Group, the German company that owns SWISS, has announced that it is rolling out passenger WiFi using a Starlink connection in August. Here’s what passengers need to know:

Rollout timeline and compatible aircraft

From August 19, passengers flying on airlines which are part of the Lufthansa Group, such as SWISS, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines, will be able to use the internet during their flight.

For now, the WiFi connection will only be available to passengers travelling on a Lufthansa Group A320neo aircraft, of which there are currently 850 in operation. The airline plans to roll out WiFi connections on all of its aircraft models by 2029.

The internet connection will be provided by Elon Musk’s Starlink, and will allow passengers to watch videos, do cloud-based work, and use “other high-speed applications during the flight,” a Lufthansa press release explained.

Since 2022, the subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX has signed contracts with over 30 international airline companies to retrofit their planes with a Starlink connection.

What personal data does Starlink collect from passengers?

Anyone considering using the new offering should know that since January 15, 2026, Starlink’s Global Privacy Policy has required customers to agree to their data being used to train the company’s “machine learning or artificial intelligence models” and that customer data can be shared with service providers and “third-party collaborators”.

According to Reuters, personal information that Starlink collects includes your location, credit card information, contacts and IP address. The company also collects “communication data, which includes audio and visual information, data in shared files, and inferences we may make from other personal information we collect”. 

It is somewhat unclear what “personal information” refers to in the latter statement. Additionally, the policy does not clarify which personal information is used to train the company’s AI models, such as xAI, which is currently used to train X’s LLM chatbot, Grok. 

“Often there's perfectly legitimate uses of your data,” technology law professor Anupam Chander told Reuters, commenting on the current Starlink privacy policy, “but it doesn’t have a clear limit to what kind of uses it will be put to”.