“It’s a long enough flight that I planned to purchase the $8 internet access and get some work done, but Southwest’s wifi portal wouldn’t accept any form of payment.”
The payment page failed. The flight data endpoint didn’t. A plain curl to current.json with no cookies and no headers returned the plane’s altitude, ground speed and ETA, and Vaughan logged it every 30 seconds for the whole flight. Southwest couldn’t take his $8 but handed out its telemetry for free.