British Airways owner IAG whose business class seats on Australian flights are old, and will not take current model headphones is trying to cut a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink to outfit its aircraft with Wi-Fi services.

This is the same airliner that shows pictures of a modern business class configuration on their web site, but when customers board an aircraft, they find that the seats are not as advertised, are more than 10 years old and have  limited audio and entertainment capability as ChannelNews found out earlier this year.

See ChannelNews story here from earlier this year. 

The airline is  is currently talking to both Starlink and Amazon.com whose satellite Project Kuiper, is fast becoming an alternative to Starlink who currently dominate the satellite Wi Fi market in Australia.

the airline group’s head of innovation, Annalisa Gigante, revealed the news to Bloomberg, however she failed to explain why the Company has been misleading Australian consumers over their business class configurations for several years.

“We are working a lot, both with Starlink and with Amazon’s Kuiper,” Gigante said. “We’ve got some really exciting things coming up, but that’s going to be for next year.”

In Australia Starlink is proving popular with JB Hi Fi witnessing what has been described as “excellent demand” for Starlink dishes.

British Airways business class customers flying out of Australia have for several year had to put up with second rate business class, limited entertainment options with the European airline group struggling to compete with Qantas and Middle East based airlines who have carved share away from the UK airline.

According to Bloomberg several airlines are currently inking deals with Starlink and others to replace costly, limited in-flight Wi-Fi.

This is because expanded satellite bandwidth has helped to produce web-surfing experiences closer to what consumers expect on the ground claim observers.

Starlink, SpaceX’s internet-from-space initiative, serves some 4 million customers through a network of thousands of satellites in a relatively low orbit around Earth.

One obstacle for Starlink is the complexity of the certification process, Gigante said however Elon Musk’s Starlink executives don’t agree with her.

US airlines can easily switch on Starlink because it’s already certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, but European carriers have to go through a certification process, Gigante said.

Asked about the discussions with IAG and the comments on certification, a SpaceX spokesperson said by email, “this is not accurate,” without providing specifics or elaborating.