Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi. Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?”Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same. The fickleness that made inflight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability. And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving. In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram. The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said. With these connections, people can use social media, play online poker, and—in theory—Zoom, though many airlines still forbid or discourage video calls.This level of connectivity might sound like a win: Airplane travel is a cramped, chaotic experience; the least you might ask is for the ability to scroll through TikTok when the limited catalog of in-flight movies gets stale. The pitch, as Grant Milstead, the vice president of digital technology at United Airlines, told me, is that with faster, free Wi-Fi, the plane can become a “living room in the sky”—where, just like in a living room on the ground, people can have the TV on for entertainment, their laptop out for productivity, and their phones nearby for messages and social media. Some people are clearly embracing that reality: On a recent 10-hour flight, the guy next to me prepped a slide deck, listened to Spotify, and flirted over DM with someone I sincerely hoped was his girlfriend.But this level of connectivity also means that, on a plane, you can no longer be blissfully unaware of what’s happening back on the ground. Before Starlink, someone on a business trip might still decide to expense suboptimal Wi-Fi to keep up the pretense of working. But for the rest of us, “Sorry, I was on a plane” was one of the last socially acceptable reasons a person could be unreachable while doing nothing except eating Biscoff cookies. A plane ride meant hours set aside to watch movies, read, or doodle, free of guilt and earthbound demands. Instead of responding to a message from your mother-in-law, you could look out the window and see rivers transformed into green ribbons. While my seatmate worked on his slide deck, all I did was watch Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick and slam Bloody Mary mix. It was glorious.The level of disconnection on a plane might have once been an inconvenience, but now people pay good money for enforced breaks from their phone. Sixteen years ago, when Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi, this magazine declared, “It’s about time!” These days, many cafés withhold Wi-Fi and ban laptops as a selling point. At least 10 million people use the Opal app, whose premium tier costs $100 annually, to lock themselves out of distracting apps, while others pay $59 for the Brick to do the same. Subpar airplane Wi-Fi included this kind of detox with the price of your ticket.No one will argue that breathing stale air in a seat that offers 30 inches of leg room counts as a wellness retreat, and the research on how much dedicated tech detoxes actually improve well-being is mixed. Still, a disconnected plane ride “might create an opportunity to temporarily remove some of the demands that normally compete for our attention—email, work messages, social media, news, and notifications,” Lisa Walsh, a psychology professor who researches happiness at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told me. Flying was a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below. Whether or not someone might benefit from that time depends on how they spend it, Kostadin Kushlev, a psychology professor at Georgetown who studies technology and well-being, told me. A nice use of a plane ride might include actually talking to the strangers next to you (an act tied to well-being, he said), letting your mind wander (also linked to well-being), or even just really focusing on Top Gun (research has yet to link Tom Cruise to well-being, but you never know). Kushlev told me about how, during grad school, he once set aside a flight to journal about what he wanted from his life and future. “It really kind of changed my trajectory,” he said. Now, with enough to keep him busy on the plane, he said, “I don’t bother.”Of course, passengers don’t have to log into the Wi-Fi. But as fast connections become ubiquitous on planes, expectations may begin to shift. We already spend just about every moment of our life near our phones—at work, at the grocery store, at parties, at concerts, in bed, and, for the 75 percent of Americans who’ve copped to this, in the bathroom—where anyone can message us. Now people could easily expect a response while we’re hurtling through the lower stratosphere, too. (And if you don’t reply, people will know it’s because you wanted to eat Biscoff cookies and ignore them.) Connectivity also means the plane becomes just another place to be productive. Milstead, the United executive, told me that one of the company’s customers vibe-coded a website for his new business from the air. Meanwhile, people have already started complaining online about fellow passengers taking Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings onboard. When your seatmate is leading a Q1 strategy session, staring out the window and daydreaming—one of the most distinct opportunities of flying—may seem like time wasted.If 30,000 feet is yet another place where Zoom meetings are unavoidable, it’s hard not to see a future in which we are nostalgic for the recent past when the Wi-Fi was bad. The early aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that flying is “a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes—purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience.” Instead, a plane ride was an opportunity to watch the familiar world grow strange. Most people who fly no longer treat the experience like a miracle, but now we barely need to notice we are up in the air. It’s just another place to check Instagram.