Connecting to airplane wifi.

A couple of months ago, I took a domestic flight on JetBlue. Remember when everyone loved them? Neither do I.

I took my seat, and as part of my usual settling routine, I tried to connect to the plane’s wifi, even though I wasn’t sure whether there was anything you could do with it without paying.

Please don’t even get me started on all the trials and tribulations of trying to use wifi on an airplane.

[pure silence]

Anyway, connecting to a plane’s wifi starts pretty similarly to connecting to wifi anywhere else. You go into settings and see that the wifi network is within range, and you select it. If you have the password, this part is usually easy.

But then comes the utterly baffling second step, which is a total crapshoot almost every time: you pray that the second popup screen welcoming you to the network decides to show, because without it, you land in some kind of purgatory where you are not connected to any internet, but also not disconnected from the network. Sometimes the popup shows, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s no rhyme or reason as to why. If it doesn’t generate on its own, you have to magically conjure it.

When it comes to airplane wifi, you stand a 0.00001% chance of that popup generating, and a 0.00002% chance of being able to manually summon it.

On this flight, I was able to connect to JetBlue’s wifi network as described in the first step, but I absolutely could not generate that second window. I couldn’t actually log in and use the internet.

I tried disconnecting and reconnecting, navigating to various websites, using different apps, and exploring every menu in the JetBlue app, mostly out of a screens addiction and inability to sit still. Eventually, I concluded that the wifi was simply broken, as it has been on about 90% of JetBlue flights I’ve taken.

But an hour into the flight, I randomly noticed a curious clue that would prove crucial to my predicament and alter the course of my flight forever. The NAPKIN the flight attendant gave me for my drink — yes, an insignificant bit of soggy, ripped, crumpled up paper — contained a QR code that seemed to imply a method to connect to wifi. I scanned it, and only then did my phone generate that second popup that granted me access to the internet.

This was the only method to connect. BY SCANNING A QR CODE ON A NAPKIN. This was never communicated anywhere, be it by the crew, the JetBlue app, a seat placard, or anywhere else. The QR code itself was also not found anywhere EXCEPT on the napkin. And it wasn’t found on EVERY napkin. Of course, everybody else on the plane was too absentminded, unconscious, or busy groaning about turbulence to have even a shred of an inkling of something being amiss. And I know for a fact that this problem has not been resolved, probably never will be, and will never be noticed again by anybody but me. ✍︎