Claude Coding at 35,000 Feet with a Travel Router

Yesterday I flew Delta to New York City to watch my daughter Lyla star in Mean Girls. That trip was already a win before the wheels left the ground. I didn’t expect to land with a day’s worth of real work done: new posts written, site changes pushed, CI green — all from seat 24A at cruising altitude on a UniFi Travel Router and Claude Code.

One Login, Every Device #

Airline WiFi captive portals are friction that compounds. Delta runs free in-flight WiFi backed by T-Mobile, but every device — laptop, phone, watch — has to authenticate independently through the browser portal. Three devices, three interruptions before you’ve done anything useful.

The UniFi Travel Router from Ubiquiti eliminates that entirely. It’s a palm-sized device running UniFi OS — you power it on (I used a power bank on the tray table), it broadcasts a private SSID, and you connect the WAN port to the airline’s network via the UniFi app. One captive portal login. Every device downstream is online, invisible to Delta’s network.

Setup was under five minutes from power-on. I had the router on the tray table as we reached cruising altitude, completed the Delta portal once, and never thought about connectivity again.

Claude Code at Cruising Altitude #

With a stable connection across all my devices, I opened Claude Code and worked on this blog — the same site you’re reading.

Tasks I’d been deferring: structural changes to the Hugo templates, drafts that needed finishing, a taxonomy cleanup. Not what you’d call flight-friendly work. The kind of thing where you expect slow responses and timeout errors.

None of that happened.

Claude Code ran cleanly for the full flight — under two hours, gate to gate. It read files, made edits, ran hugo serve to validate builds, checked link responses. Anthropic’s API is small-payload traffic — no video streams, no large downloads. Delta’s free T-Mobile WiFi is not fast, but it’s steady, and steady is what matters. The workload matched the medium.

I wrote previously about Claude Code after the Code with Claude event — the capabilities, the agentic loop. This flight wasn’t about any of that. It was proof that the experience holds up in constrained conditions. No gigabit fiber. Seat 24A, somewhere over Pennsylvania.

By descent into LGA, every item was done. Branch pushed, PR open, Cloudflare Pages building. I closed the laptop and thought about Lyla’s show.

Next Time, the Whole Family #

I flew alone this time. Next time I’m bringing everyone.

Solo, the UniFi Travel Router solves an annoyance: three devices, one login. For a family of four — phones, tablets, a laptop, an e-reader — it solves a coordination problem. One authentication, and everyone connects to a familiar SSID the same way they connect at home. The portal friction disappears for the group, not just the person who thought to bring the router.

Next time Lyla performs — and there will be a next time, because she’s that good — the whole family will be there. The router will come with us.

What Actually Changed #

Two things made this flight possible.

Delta Free WiFi isn’t fast. But for API-driven development work — small payloads to a cloud service, not streaming — it’s enough. The T-Mobile partnership delivered consistent enough latency for an uninterrupted coding session the full flight. That wasn’t true on most domestic routes two years ago.

The second is that consumer networking hardware reached enterprise capability. The UniFi Travel Router is a $79 device with a managed WAN port, private LAN, and a mobile management app. I’ve been running Ubiquiti hardware at home for years — the 2024 post on DNS over HTTPS with Unifi and Cloudflare Zero Trust covers part of that setup. Bringing the same ecosystem into travel required no ramp-up. Same app, same configuration model, different venue.

A sub-two-hour flight is a legitimate work block now. Not dead time to manage around.

I landed at LGA, cleared the terminal, and called Lyla. She was heading into final rehearsals. The site changes were already live on the preview deployment.

The flight got the work done. The show is what mattered.