A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

If you move to an empty seat to prevent WiFi signal strength triangulation, and assuming the cabin has no cameras, you didn't auth to the network with identifiable information, actually encrypt your Xray proxy connection (which OP didn't), and you have MAC randomization on, there's next to no way the airliner would be able (or even care) to identify that you did what was described in the article. Sure, they could use DPI and behavioral analysis to detect you were misusing the network, but if they're doing that, they would just block this sort of "backdoor" from the get-go.

I'll echo the article's disclaimer: This reply is intended solely for educational and research purposes. I affirm the strict adherence to all relevant regulations and service terms.

I highly doubt any airline staff are on your flight (or even remotely) counter-hacking one in a billion passengers messing around with the in-flight WiFi. That $30.75 they're not getting doesn't justify anyone looking into it.

Plus, the free tier is usually set to a very low QoS such that chat is pretty much the only thing you'd bother doing. Short videos will download in a reasonable amount of time but on average, the actual data rate is small. There's only so much bandwidth available and they want to make the $30 somewhat of a value for those needing full Internet access. One person absolutely saturating the limited bandwidth allowed for the free tier is not going to make much of a difference for everyone else but it could be an issue if everyone was doing it (like if a VPN was all that was required to bypass the restrictions).