Qantas has updated its rules to require passengers to gain consent of crew and other customers before filming them.
Flight attendant unions are pushing for legal prohibitions in Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. KLM often makes announcements against photographing crewmembers even though actual rules are less clear – like many airlines saying that only ‘personal’ photos and videos may be taken, though that’s not clearly defined.
From their earliest days, flight attendants have faced sexual harassment. Harassment may be somewhat less common in the U.S. than it used to be since social norms have shifted away from “coffee, tea, or me?” and air travel itself is, for the most part, no longer ‘sexy’. But nearly everyone has video now in their pockets. Crew also don’t like just being filmed in their workplace.
One flight attendant, Kate*, described the disconcerting feeling of someone aiming a smartphone camera at her while she was simply trying to do her job, saying: “You don’t know why they’re filming or what they’ll do with it.”
Marie spoke of being featured in a TikTok video during a safety demonstration, with viewers making fun of her appearance. Charlotte, after refusing to serve more alcohol to an intoxicated passenger, had a camera thrust in her face, accompanied by threats to her job.
Yet without film, it’s the passenger who would have been blamed when Chicago airport police dragged David Dao off of a United Express flight and bloodied him at the behest of crew who sought his removal to make room for employees to travel.
Initially United’s CEO Oscar Munoz apologized to other customers that they had to be re-accommodated after the incident, rather than being shocked and appalled at the treatment of their customer Dr. Dao.
@United overbook #flight3411 and decided to force random passengers off the plane. Here's how they did it: pic.twitter.com/QfefM8X2cW
— Jayse D. Anspach (@JayseDavid) April 10, 2017
Here’s pioneering travel blogger Daraius Dubash (“Million Mile Secrets”) kicked off of an American Airlines flight for speaking out against racism. He takes photos of the incident, and video at the gate after his removal. Fortunately the responding police officers were professional in their handling. Blogger Matthew Klint was thrown off a United flight for taking pictures.
Film and video are necessary to get at the real facts behind onboard incidents which would otherwise go against the passenger – with airlines siding with their employees (and unions) and the Department of Transportation unable to sort out incidents.
After 9/11 there was a push for video inside of cabins, but aviation unions pushed back on this not wanting to have their work filmed.
On the other hand maybe rules need to limit cabin crew from filming passengers? I see plenty of in-cabin material posted to flight attendant social media. And here’s a flight attendant caught taking video up female passenger skirts as they walk by the galley during boarding. And an American Airlines flight attendant appears to have placed his iPhone camera in the lavatory to record a female teen passenger.
Rules around the world vary tremendously, and Americans should realize when traveling abroad that their freedoms and norms do not follow them. In India passengers have been arrested for filming female flight credit (‘outraging the modesty of women’). Three passengers were held in a Turkish prison after filming a flight attendant doing a safety video.
Definitions are hard, but it seems improper to film someone for prurient reasons yet necessary to protect passenger rights too. And increasingly any job performed in public, in front of customers, is being performed in public. Authoritarian regimes may genuinely punish behavior, although mostly inconsistently, which creates risk and uncertainty. In the case of Qantas I suspect this won’t be much enforced, until it is, and that uneven enforcement (which doesn’t carry risk of imprisonment!) will become a source of controversy – even though Australians are in some ways rule-followers more than Americans are.
(HT: Andrew D)
No comments so far, for sure it’s a tough issue and hard to suggest anything that wouldn’t offend one of the parties involved. Your summary is on the money, Gary: On the one hand it’s reasonable to protect the privacy of the crew, and as you say on the other hand “Film and video are necessary to get at the real facts behind onboard incidents”. One potential solution is to allow video only of fellow passengers as they interact with the crew (FA out of the field of view), but allow audio of the FA ? It’s not unlikely that the FA’s (and Union & Airline) still may not like it, but it’s about as reasonable as it gets.
Gary, not only do US laws and rights matter internationally but US airlines can legally stop people from filming. They are private companies and there is no “right” to film a company’s employees at work. Granted in a public place, like a street or even in the airport terminal you could film but I’m pretty sure it is within the rights o the airline to prohibit any filming on board (regardless of what you feel may be appropriate).
Tough issue on both sides of the fence.
@AC – Airlines can stop passengers from filming on their aircraft, certainly, if they adopt rules to that effect. Many loosened their filming rules post-David Dao and with cultural change around smartphones.
Whether they can ban filming in airports (eg gates and ticket counters leased from public entities) is trickier, though some have had policies to this effect.
It’s interesting, and not surprising, that the unions would push back against video in the cabins. I’m sure it’s similar to an experience I had years ago. My last summer in college, I took an internship working at one of the big-three US auto makers at a final assembly plant. At the end of the assembly line, inspectors would drive the vehicles off of the end of the line to take them through the final testing processes. This plant had an epidemic of the vehicles being crashed during inspection, yet no one owned up to being at fault. The management wanted to put cameras up to monitor the final inspection area (ensuring the cameras were not picking up any of the assembly line area where “illegal” time-studies could be performed), but the union was opposed and managed to prevent the cameras from being installed. Per union rules, any security that would have been hired to monitor the inspection area would have become union members after 90 days (as an intern (non-managerial), I had to be off-site after 89 days or I would have become a union member as well and would still be receiving a paycheck based on the particular rules at this plant), so they never could determine who was responsible for these “accidents”.
Fast forward to my summer, one of the products we built was just a chassis with no trim (for sale to commercial customizers who would install their own trim). The post-inspection area was near the entrance/exit for the hourly staff (due to the still-active tension between management and union at this plant (year 2000), there were separate entrances and exits for each). Someone (or someones) was pulling cables out of chassis waiting to be loaded for transport – since it was post-inspection, the issues caused by this sabotage would likely not be discovered until after sale of the vehicle and some of the sabotage was safety related (i.e., disabling the rear brakes). Again, the management wanted security cameras up on this line (well away from where anyone was working) and the union opposed it – I can only assume because they supported the sabotage and didn’t want the bad-actors discovered or punished. Again, they won, so no cameras there to ensure customers’ safety wasn’t being put at risk.
There is no reason for anyone to be filming anyone else without their permission. (David Dao was in the wrong and the issue could have been resollved with signed statements.)
This loser murikan fascination with YouTube/TikTok hits and voyeurism has to stop. I don’t film the passengers when they are having a bad day.
Thanks for promoting more rudeness and vapid stupidity on the airlines.
With the graphic filming of the Dr. Dao incident being necessary for steps leading to better treatment of passengers, any anti-filming rules should be of a narrow scope. I do sometimes take photos on an airplane but they are usually limited to the information card that has the airplane type and to photos out the window of landforms below (I wish I had taken one on a KAL flight as it flew from Alaska to Russian airspace).
While airlines are usually private companies and not run by the government, here is a link to a recent video of security guards calling police in Kapolei, Hawaii, to kick a journalist out of a public building for taking photos in a public area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S0OcbzSw6k
Here is another video of an encounter with a reporter and the Scottsdale, Arizona, police for filming on a public sidewalk.
Why doesn’t an airline ban an unethical passenger, given the enormous meta-data and other data attached to all electronic media, these days?
My purchase of my first digital camera 24 years ago sparked a photographic obsession in me. I shot photos of everything! Nothing was too mundane to escape capture. Combine that with my lifelong love and fascination with flying and everything related to it, and you can imagine how I behaved on flights. I even bought a film camera that didn’t need batteries so I could shoot photos during take-off and landing.
A few years ago, I was flying for work and shooting photos of the cabin on my flight, when an attendant walking up the aisle from the other end of the cabin noticed me putting my camera away. She asked me if I had photographed her. I supposed that was possible, as she had walked into my line of sight. She demanded that I erase those photos. I refused. After take-off, her supervisor told me that if I didn’t erase those photos immediately, I would be arrested on landing. I refused. So, I was arrested on landing and hauled (man-handled) into the investigator’s office at the airport. After lengthy questioning, he let me go with a warning. I was able to catch my connecting flight to the city where I would be working. I asked a flight attendant on the next flight if I could shoot photos, but she said something along the lines of, “Don’t even ask.”
The next week, I was sent on another flight. I didn’t want to fly on the same airline, but my employer sent me that way. As it happened, the same flight attendant was working that flight. You should have seen her face when she saw me walk onto her flight! However, the flight passed uneventfully.
As an avid, semi-professional photographer for a few decades, I’m aware that many people in all parts of life, are anti-photography. I’ve been threatened by civilians and arrested, detained and investigated by police. I read about photographer’s civil rights being infringed by people who oppose the act of photography. Sentiment that photographers must ask for consent from every person whose image will appear in a photograph, even of a crowded, public city street, are not unusual, even as they are impractical. My feeling is, if I can see it, I can photograph it; it’s fair game.
Insightful analysis – private companies have the right to say “no filming” but when their employees engage in unlawful and violent acts, that video record is essential.
PS Whoever claims David Dao was in the wrong is either woefully ignorant or a United Airlines shill, or both. They need to do the research.
Geez. Take pix all the time, Emirates, Singapore Air,Garuda, etc.
Of my seat, meal, my daughter, out the window. Never had a single FA say a thing.
Hope this spreads. Your right to be yet another social media dipwad ends at my right not to be filmed.
David Dao was in the wrong. The jet is private commercial property. The manager of private commercial property has the right to require a patron to leave. Whether David Dao might have had economic recourse for the airline declining to allow him to fly is a separate story. But once he was asked to leave this private commercial property, he was obliged to comply. What United did wrong was having law enforcement forcibly remove him in front of other passengers. All they had to do was deplane the entire aircraft. After all passengers were off, if David Dao still refused to deplane, at that point law enforcement could be brought in to forcibly deplane David Dao. Since David Dao, airlines have used the “entire aircraft deplaning technique” to secure pre-departure removal of a seated passenger who refuses to deplane without a public forcible deplaning.
Never had an issue filming or photographing anything on a plane. Took thousands of photos/videos on a recent 3 mo+ trip. Oh..and almost zero photos / videos of myself. Maybe just a few. People who photograph themselves are too self-minded. Also known as leaning toward SELF-ISH.
Don’t make a mountain out a mole hill..but nice compilation article nevertheless.
Like aborigines, I don’t like being photographed so much…I can see why a FA would not like it.
We have too many photos in the world and too many people taking them all the time. [I don’t carry a mobile phone — so most of the time, no camera on me – only when actively traveling] We’ve gone from starved for info – to saturation in 1 century.
I once did a mutli-month world trip in 2010 and took ZERO photos, I didn’t have a camera. I even went to hard to go places like Iran – no photos. No regrets. You see and learn different things. You experience a place differently.
On a larger trip 20 years ago, I reserved one day every week or two to be my no camera day. Just use my eyes & ears. More people could stand to do this. Avg 2 week trip, go 2 days without any camera – leave it at the hotel room.
In the not too distant future, I’m going to leave my camera behind again – more/less for good. But this is another story.
Gary;
Thank you for taking this on. It is clear we need a hard and fast law protecting photographers’ rights and that there are more upvotes for tasteful cabin photos than downvotes. Although you will make few to no friends among airline employees taking this on, many of us who review flights will appreciate you standing up against those who abuse their authority.
Frankly, airlines should tell flight attendants if they want the pay they so richly deserve, then closed circuit TV of cabins and passenger photography protections go with it. That’ll end this really fast – and deter unruly passengers as much as closed circuit TV does on public transportation.
Thoughtfully;
Joe
Dr. Dao was wrong, period. All airlines have the right to remove any passenger for any reason. He was the last person to buy a ticket, had no airline status, and the computer listed him as the least valuable flier. Every single airline has this ranking. They will punt their least likely client before their most.
An overbooking happened, United needed the seat, and Dao was asked to leave politely. He lied and said he was a doctor due for surgery the next day. Both were false statements. Then he wouldn’t leave. Is United suppose to give in to a man now acting oddly and not following FAA, and US law, as well as the regs he agreed to on his contract of carriage at the time of purchase? Leave this man on board? Now there is a new issue, his belligerence and attitude, also reason to remove him.
So United calls the police, who tell him he has to leave, and it will happen one way or another. Leave walking out, or be removed forcibly. Again, Mr. Dao chooses to defy laws, rules, airline and police orders. Now are the police suppose to walk off? Give in? Of course not.
So police remove him forcibly, and now it’s all United’s fault? Imagine you call the police on a neighbor who won’t leave their home, and the police use force to remove that person, is that your fault?
As for photographing on planes, the airlines are private companies, you are on private property, and they can demand/require not photography. In public areas, such as airports, boarding areas, etc, you are legally protected in your right to photograph. Public property, no expectation of privacy. The law generally allows you to photograph on private property you are allowed to or invited to be on, but once that right is revoked, you must stop.
I’m a pro photographer. 8 years in the White House, many years at Time-Life Pictures, Getty, Allsport and more. I am well versed on the laws and regs, on our photography rights. All being said, most airlines, most businesses, won’t care if you are shooting (non-commercially), for your own use, as long as you are not causing a scene or bothering anyone else. Airlines need to have direct and clear policy per on board photography, frankly, and then passengers and airline staff must follow the written rules.
@Gary – Interesting new style of artwork you’ve been using recently, kind of retro ethereal. It’s like it was generated by AI.
@ Gary. even though Australians are in some ways rule-followers more than Americans are.
I’ll say. Last time departing AU had a gate agent from another airline who was walking by decide she wanted to count our carryons, questioning whether my wife’s pillow was a bag.
If the airlines wanted to promote safety as much as public transits promote safety, then bring in closed circuit TV and tell flight attendants to stop harassing travel photographers.
@Christian — yes, AI-generated images
Re Mike Stahlschmidt says:
December 30, 2023 at 3:23 pm
Thanks Mike, I agree.
“Airlines need to have direct and clear policy per on board photography, frankly, and then passengers and airline staff must follow the written rules.”
With that: One thing that could also be done is with the down-the-cabin photos I like to take for my reviews, I go to the back galley to take them to preserve passenger privacy. We all want a peaceful flight and one scopophobe having a tantrum – and I had this happen on a Trimet WES Train – can cause unnecessary stress.
AC – want to bet? FL specifically defines airplanes as a place of public accommodation. And you have no right to privacy in a public place, and no, the airline can’t stop me taking photos.
Kelldoge – GFYS. I don’t need your permission, and no, Dao wasn’t.
Ricport – you have no such right. Not in a public place.
Mike f – private, yes, but also common carrier. Different rules. Tell me you’re an airline shill POS without telling me….
Dr. Dao got what he deserved. He refused to leave and had to be removed.
If someone was in your home and refused you would remove them by all means.
Walter The Rube
I have news for you, little man. The law gives the Captain great discretion on tossing your feeble carcASS from the airplane. Further, the plane needs me way more than they need you as a disruptive passenger.
So next time, you want to act like a jackass on a flight, try me. You will likely find yourself walking back to your trailer park.
So GFYS and have a Happy New Year.