United Airlines is taking aim at one of the most annoying in-flight trends just as Starlink rolls out across its fleet, a technology that could otherwise make the problem far worse.
United Airlines Threatens To Ban Passengers Who Do Not Use Headphones
If you have flown recently, you have probably encountered it: a passenger scrolling TikTok or watching videos on full volume, acting like the cabin is their living room. United Airlines already recently added an explicit pre-flight announcement that warn passengers to use headphones when using their portable devices, but has now gone even further in updating its contract of carriage to explicitly allow the airline to refuse transport to passengers who do not use headphones while listening to audio or video content. Among the official reasons you can now be removed from a United flight include:
Passengers who fail to use headphones while listening to audio or video content.
Seatback systems already require headphones for audio, so this is about personal devices like phones and tablets that can be turned up to disturb others. And by placing the rule in the “refusal to transport” section of the Contract of Carriage, United is elevating this from “please be considerate” to “comply or you may not fly.”
And to that, I say amen.
It boggles my mind that anyone would ever think it is acceptable to forgo headphones or think that others cannot hear it the volume is on low. The biggest culprits tend to be bad parents who hand over devices to their children with the volume turned up, but many adult “babies” are guilty of this to.
Other Contractual Changes Necessitated By Starlink
Interestingly, View From The Wing notes that this headphone language is part of a broader tightening of United’s rules, including bans on inflight video calls and language addressing “offensive content,” plus efforts to crack down on passengers buying multiple tickets in certain ways (essentially cracking down further on back-to-back-ticketing to skirt minimum stay rules…the subject for another post).
United is right to act proactively on this, as the problem will only get worse. As free high speed Wi-Fi comes to more flights, we will see more people able to be annoying not just on the ground, but in the air. Loud sounds, porn, and video calls will all be possible, so cracking down on it now makes sense.
CONCLUSION
A contract of carriage update at Untied Airlines explicitly warns that passengers may be removed for not using headphones when listening to audio or video onboard.
United is not reinventing etiquette here. It is simply turning a common-sense expectation into an enforceable rule. Most passengers already use headphones, and the ones who do are usually corrected (and then usually comply). Even so, if United backs this up with consistent enforcement, it hopefully will discourage these people from even attempting it at all…
It sounds like United is going to have to stop flying to Miami.
And they just had an evacuation at LAX earlier today… UA2127.
Are they actually going to enforce this?
This all happened because an an Apple executive, like Steve Jobs himself, announced the remove of the headphone jack to be “cool” without considering the implications. Eventually, nearly every iPhone becomes e-waste but before it does, it gets into the hands of someone who can barely afford the crab egg rolls at the Dollar Tree. These people will simply blast the phone on speaker in public wherever they go setting a trend. Then there’s the seniors who can’t figure out bluetooth pairing or people who have just forgotten to charge their headsets.
The $1 headset was a great way to keep people polite. Heck, if the headphone jack was still there, we could just hand out dollar tree headphones to offenders to get them to be quiet.