While debates around reclining one’s plane seat or pulling down the window shade on a day flight goes back several decades, some plane behaviors are pretty universally agreed upon as very bad manners.
One such behaviors that increasingly comes up is listening to music or even making a call with the headphones off.
Related: Video of airplane fight with kid over window shade goes viral
“Put on your headphones and let the rest of us enjoy our flight in relative peace,” Zachary Wilter, a columnist with USA Today’s Cruising Altitude blog, recently wrote. “I’ve said more than once to friends that this kind of thing should be worthy of jail time and while I realize that’s a bit of an overreaction, it is extremely frustrating to have your personal bubble popped in this inescapable way.”
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This type of behavior has become more common as widespread availability of in-flight Wi-Fi has made it possible to play videos and make calls during the flight. While airlines generally disable the speaker option on the seatback entertainment system, sometimes the problem extends to how passengers play games on or otherwise interact with the screen.
Wilter described a flight in which a woman on the seat behind him was playing a game on the entertainment system installed on the back of his seat headrest and he kept feeling a finger tap the back of his head.
“It’s the kind of thing that only leads to heightened stress in a sealed metal tube hurtling through the sky, and makes flying less enjoyable for everyone – even for us avgeeks who think of planes as our happy place,” he wrote.
On airplanes, 'listening to videos on speaker mode is over’
Amid an increase in speaker use, air crew have been reminding passengers that using headphones is a basic courtesy. In the summer of 2023, an American Airlines (AAL) pilot went viral for an overhead announcement in which he called out those who think using them is optional (Wilter also called out inconsiderate speaker use as “ruining society.”)
“The social experiment of listening to videos on speaker mode and talking on a cellphone in speaker mode is over,” says the unidentified captain whose overhead announcement was posted on TikTok by a traveler on the flight. “Over and done in this country. Nobody wants to hear your video. I know you think it’s super sweet. It probably is but it’s your business, right?”
At around the same time, travel platform Kayak found that other in-flight behaviors universally considered unacceptable by travelers include taking off one’s socks during the flight (76% of the 1,000 adult travelers polled called this an unacceptable behavior) and putting one’s long hair behind the seatback so that the traveler behind you can see it (74% said this is in no way okay).
Children on planes, in turn, are one of the most controversial topics when it comes to air travel. Twenty-six percent of respondents said that it is never okay to bring a baby aboard a flight while 74% fell somewhere along a less categorical range of it being okay only during emergency trips to “babies cry sometimes and we were all them once so deal with it.”
