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The airline CEO putting Starlink on every plane

Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, joins John and Ben Thompson to break down the airline business and United’s contrarian bets shaping commercial aviation.

Scott details United’s massive COVID fleet expansion while competitors shrank, why customer surveys are useless for predicting the future, and rolling out SpaceX’s Starlink across the entire fleet. They also cover in-housing seatback software, why low-cost carriers fail, air traffic control bottlenecks, and Scott’s weekend vibe coding projects.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:26) Buying planes while the world shrank

(00:06:35)…

The skinny

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