I spent a recent flight finding out what I could do with a connection to the flight’s wifi, but without access to the internet. I was on my way home from Strange Loop, a direct flight from St. Louis to Oakland. 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 web page didn’t give me any helpful error messages, so I opened up my browser’s network dev tools to see if I could figure out what was going wrong.