One of the most irritating trends has taken to the friendly skies.
There has been an alarming uptick in passengers having conservations on speaker mode or watching movies and TV shows sans headphones on both the plane and at the airport.
“At first it irritated me. Then it annoyed me. Then it got me angry. Now I’m just bewildered,” Canadian railway foreman Brennan Smith, 43, told the Wall Street Journal while describing the aggravating phenomenon. “I don’t know why they don’t have signs up. There should be an announcement on the plane.”
Ady Beitler, 43, recalled one instance at Washington Dulles Airport where a fellow passenger bickered with their partner over a bathroom towel over the phone. They weren’t using a speaker so the convo was impossible to ignore and even got Beitler “emotionally invested in the drama.”
Flyer Tracey Parsons said this phenomenon is worse in the airport gate area, claiming she’s been subjected to this at nearly every airport she’s passed through in recent years.
“I don’t want to listen to your phone call. I don’t want to listen to both sides,” she fumed. “I don’t want to watch TikTok with you. It’s gobsmacking to me — we used to have headphones.”
This irritating trend — whose perpetrators span all age groups and socioeconomic classes — doesn’t cease after takeoff.
“I will see it probably every single flight,” said one flight attendant for a major US airline, noting that a withering glance is usually enough to shame headphone-less entertainment watchers into silence.
Notably, not keeping one’s entertainment to themselves seems to be prevalent in a variety of public spaces from coffee shops to subway cars. But it’s perhaps worse in the air because, unlike on the subway, passengers can’t just move to another car when a flyer decides to watch “Beat Bobby Flay” on full blast.
To try and curb the trend, some airlines such as American Airlines and Alaska Air, are now making announcements imploring flyers to employ earphones.
Delta notably added a headphone usage advisory at the bottom of its in-flight entertainment page.
There are whole Reddit threads dedicated to inconsiderate travelers who don’t mind broadcasting both their entertainment and personal phone convos to their fellow flyers.
“Admittedly I fly a lot for work, but so far this year I’ve told about 6 people that were watching stuff in an airport that their headphones aren’t plugged in,” wrote one perturbed passenger. “Device sitting there blaring away while their headphones are in. No idea how they didn’t notice it wasn’t their headphones.
They added, “I’ve also noticed that almost nobody will tell these people either. They just sit around looking at one another.”
Unfortunately, confronting offenders can sometimes backfire.
Shannon Black, from Vancouver, Washington, recalled calling out a woman video chatting on speaker in Delta’s Salt Lake City airport lounge. She asked if the offender minded using headphones, but they deemed Black’s suggestion “incredibly rude.”
Some flyers have even claimed that some headphone abstainers do so on purpose to try and instigate a fight. “These days it’s hard to know who is a loose cannon or baiting for confrontation,” declared one poster on Reddit. “I don’t need to get punched or [have a] weapon drawn on me for asking them, however polite, to please turn down the volume.”
Interestingly, the phenomenon coincides with cheap wired headphones being less ubiquitous than before. In 2016, Apple removed the iPhone’s headphone jack to make space for other inputs, with Android following suit.
This forced users to have to buy wireless headphones for private listening, which meant spending more money and the hassle of having another device to charge.
Meanwhile, Neil Cybart, founder of Apple analysis site Above Avalon, attributed this device noise pollution to the fact that people are “simply watching a whole lot more video” than before.
Another possible culprit, per the WSJ, is an overall downward trend in decorum, which permeates everything from fashion to the way people communicate with employers at the office.
