AirplaneMode
Simulate realistic airplane WiFi on macOS
Details
- External ID
- 47603632
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- AirplaneMode
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.11182519280205655
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I needed to test how my app performed on airplane WiFi and found that existing tools (Network Link Conditioner, comcast, Chrome DevTools, etc) weren't sufficient.AirplaneMode is a macOS CLI and menu bar app that uses a local MASQUE relay to provide:1. Jitter. All of the mac os network simulators I tried apply a fixed constant delay with no jitter model. Real airplane satellite WiFi follows a log-normal distribution — most packets arrive near base RTT, but a few percent spike to 5-10x. AirplaneMode samples jitter from a log-normal distribution fit to real flight measurements.2. Userspace, with domain scoping and UDP support. No root required. A .mobileconfig profile routes only matched domains through the relay — the rest of your network is unaffected. The relay operates at the UDP packet level via MASQUE, so HTTP/3 and QUIC congestion control respond naturally to simulated conditions.3. Realistic Profiles. Airlines use performance-enhancing proxies that inflate speed test results. Presets are calibrated from real flights using TLS handshake timing, throughput, and traceroute data collected in the air.Existing profiles (looking for help in calibrating more):1. Turkish Airlines JFK→IST (Panasonic Ku-band GEO): ~870ms RTT, 86 KB/s, 2.3s jitter P99. 2. JetBlue domestic (Viasat Ka-band): ~593ms RTT, 3.3 Mbps. 3. American Airlines LGA→EYW (Intelsat GEO): ~715ms RTT, 4.2 Mbps.If you’re on a flight with Wifi, the repo includes a script to grab traces and a GitHub issue template for submitting them. Just run `sudo ./scripts/flight-bench.sh` a few times during the flight and submit the JSON files. We'll fit a profile from your data.
Enrichment
- Theme
- space and geospatial visualization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- macos airplane wifi network simulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a custom network emulator using a local MASQUE proxy (HTTP/3 and QUIC tunneling) with custom packet scheduling, jitter, and packet loss on macOS requires deep systems and networking protocol expertise.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a Swift or Rust macOS system daemon integrating Apple's NetworkExtension framework or Packet Filter (pf) alongside a full MASQUE (RFC 9298) HTTP/3 QUIC relay implementation. The primary challenge is accurately manipulating kernel-level network queues to inject deterministic jitter, latency distributions, and packet drops across arbitrary TCP/UDP connections without breaking OS networking. This demands specialized domain knowledge in transport layer networking protocols (QUIC/MASQUE) and low-level macOS network driver architecture.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: low-bandwidth simulators
Concerns raised: simulators don't feel realistic compared to actual field conditions, bugs only reproducible in low-bandwidth conditions are hard to debug, wifi on airplanes blocks DNS requests to payment domains
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 39 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #40 of 40 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 148 days after the earliest competitor.
- wfb-link, a userspace WiFiBroadcast radio stack for macOS · hn · 2026-05-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Airport_RTW88 · github · 2026-09-11 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- CabinLink · ph · 2026-06-07 · 295 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Forensic evidence of iOS mesh networking bypassing Airplane Mode · hn · 2026-01-01 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- SwiftRoute · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Wingman · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- RefundFlightWiFi · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Will my flight have Starlink? · hn · 2026-03-18 · 276 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.