What can you see when you visualize the information obtained from the in-flight Wi-Fi portal site?

Blogger James Vaughan connected to a Wi-Fi portal site from an airplane where Wi-Fi is available and visualized the information obtained from there.

Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight - james vaughan

Mr. Vaughn boarded a plane from Missouri to California and tried to use the optional in-flight Wi-Fi. However, when he tried to purchase internet access rights on the plane, the payment failed many times and no error message was displayed. Therefore, Mr. Vaughn used the browser's developer tools on the portal site to investigate what was causing the problem.

When Mr. Vaughan looked at the network tab of the developer tools, he noticed that there were regular requests for 'current.json'.

Therefore, Mr. Vaughn used the browser's 'copy as cURL' function to obtain the request.

Knowing that the data contained in this request can be easily fetched, Vaughan collected the data from current.json into a log file with the command below.
[code]watch -n 30 'curl https://getconnected.southwestwifi.com/current.json | jq -c >> flight-logs'[/code]

The contents of the data obtained from current.json are below. Mr. Vaughan annotates each field to provide his interpretation of the information.
[code]
{
// Possibly information about the system's satellite internet connection
'sat_commlink_portal': {
// means there is no problem with the connection
'status': 'conn_ok',
// This time hasn't changed at all and I don't know what it is
'time': 'Sun Sep 24 22:02:19 2023'
},

// Current flight progress rate I don't know if this is distance or length of time
'pcent_flt_complete': 33,

// current altitude
'altVal': '35998',

// current coordinates
'lat': '40.201',
'lon': '-100.755',

// More information about your system's satellite internet connection?
'satcomm_status': {
// connection is active
'commlink': 'active',
// Something is not stale
'linkparams': 'not-stale'
},

// The time zone of this flight's destination is PDT (Pacific Standard Time (Daylight Saving Time))
'dtzone': 'PDT',

// This flight is within the US
'within_us': true,

// Estimated time of arrival at destination
'etad': '06:19 PM',

// Current ground speed.
'gspdVal': '487',

// Estimated time remaining, maybe 'time-to-ground-contact'?
'ttgc': '2h 25m',

// Remaining distance of flight (miles)
'dist_remain': '1167',

// Current time in each time zone
'actime24': '15:54'
}
[/code]

Vaughan coded a script on the plane to compile and visualize the collected data.

This is the change in altitude over time.

Below is a more enlarged view with only the data at the time of descent deleted. The altitude of the plane only varied by 20 to 30 feet (about 6 to 9 meters) throughout the flight, and Mr. Vaughn commented, ``It was more stable than I expected.''

Below is the change in estimated arrival times over time. There were no major delays in the estimated time, and it seemed to be a stable flight overall.

This is the change in ground speed over time. Vaughn commented, ``I wish we had started collecting data earlier in the flight. I'm interested to see what shape this curve takes as we approach cruising speed.''