Fixing UnitedWifi.com not working on my Mac laptop

Nothing's more of a first world problem than the WiFi not working on your plane. Hell, it can even be a bit of a boon if you use your productivity right. But you're annoyed, you're stuck in a tin can miraculous invention, 1 I'm flying directly from San Francisco to Rome, and it'd be unimaginable even 60 years ago. you've already come to grips with the fact that Starlink 2 Not only does it provide WiFi on planes, it also currently provides over half of the revenue for a company that positions its value on a $22.7T addressable market for AI enterprise applications. Just like writing blog posts on airplanes! wasn't turned on for your flight yet, and instead of an internet connection you're seeing "Your connection is not private" and NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID:

If you manage to click past the scary warning in Chrome (and the inflightpanasonic.aero certificate details that are triggering it) you're greeted by a useful "Oops.. Something went wrong. Please try again." error message that can't even be bothered to include the third ellipsis dot.

But you're reading this post that I wrote while still in the air 3 It's been a while since I've done this. I think the Boingo one and my notes for the Sudoku python solver (and the solver itself) were airplane creations. — so how did I fix it?

What didn't work

There's a lot of things that didn't work. I'm including them here for completeness sake for when I need this again.

  1. Forget the network, and reconnect to it.
  2. Try using Safari or Firefox instead of Chrome.
  3. Disconnect your VPN (search "VPN" in System Settings — if clicking "Connect or disconnect VPN" doesn't bring anything up, you're good):
  4. Turn off Private Relay in your iCloud settings.
  5. Remove the custom DNS settings for the WiFi network.
    Click "Details" If there's anything here (like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1) select it and delete it using the minus button. It should look like this when you're done.
  6. Use Incognito mode.
  7. Use an alternate link to load the website:
    1. http://www.unitedwifi.com
    2. https://www.unitedwifi.com
    3. http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html
    4. http://example.com
    5. http://neverssl.com
    6. 198.6.2.1
    7. The router IP (in this case 172.19.248.1)
    8. http://wifigroundportal.united.com
    9. http://msftconnecttest.com/redirect

What did work

A combination of the above! Specifically going to 198.6.1.2 in Safari instead of Chrome loaded the screen. I'm pretty sure that any HTTP IP address in Safari would do it, but like all airplane WiFi bugs, they're impossible to reproduce. 4 Mostly impossible in the sense that once it's fixed you'd have to pay me to break it again. Hopefully this helps me in the future, and if it helps you, random fictional future reader, 5 then all the better.

  1. I'm flying directly from San Francisco to Rome, and it'd be unimaginable even 60 years ago. ↩︎

  2. It's been a while since I've done this. I think the Boingo one and my notes for the Sudoku python solver (and the solver itself) were airplane creations. ↩︎

  3. Mostly impossible in the sense that once it's fixed you'd have to pay me to break it again. ↩︎

  4.  ↩︎