Passenger Faces 2 Years in Jail for Recording Female Flight Attendants

by Gary Leff

A 38 year old man refused orders to stop taking video of flight attendants with his phone.

He was flying IndiGo from Kolkata to Mumbai while shooting the video. Crew confiscated his phone and police met the aircraft on arrival.

According to and IndiGo spokesperson, “The safety of our passengers and crew is of utmost importance and there is no compromise towards safety.” Paging Matthew Klint.. Matthew Klint to the white courtesy phone.

The passenger was charged with “assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty.”

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. […] The government says inflight photography may “result in compromise in maintaining the highest standards of safety” but this isn’t a Covid-19 regulation, it was a pre-existing rule in India. And it seems more related to charges that have been brought against passengers taking pictures of female flight attendants, who are also charged with ‘outraging the modesty of a womn’. […]

Comments

  1. A question is if he was doing this for fun or had an issue he wanted to document. If the latter then it needs to be pushed back in the strongest way possible. Police forces in the US felt free to order citizens to stop taking video with their phones until they were unmasked committing summary street executions and suddenly everyone was pulling out their phones to record abuse, and/or effectively curtailing its application. Any police forces since then which have attempted to stop recording of them have been slapped down in the harshest possible manner by courts. One judge in New Jersey asked the cop if he thought he had the right to use the courts to cover up abusive behavior, and why else would he not want to be recorded just as he’d want to be shown as a hero if presented the opportunity. The scoundrels really get outed here.

  2. While I think he should have shut off the phone, I have to admit to being really puzzled by the charge. Is there any proof or even strong evidence that the intent was to outrage the FA’s modesty? Also, I’m not at all sure that either assault or criminal force is valid. It sounds more like a comparatively harmless weirdo than a violent felon. Maybe a better course would be to confiscate his phone and ban him from flying the airline again.

  3. Given the seemingly larger issues of sexism, rape, and treatment of women in India covered in other news stories I’m just glad to see they’re charging someone rather than letting it slide like other news stories seem to report after worse offenses.

  4. The only way that charging him with that clause makes sense is if he was using the phone to try and take upskirt pictures. Otherwise its an overreaction and the airhostesses need to learn that a plane is a public space and cameras are allowed.

  5. Truly backwards country with barbaric laws. No justice is possible with these type of thoughtcrime, authoritarian laws.

Comments are closed.