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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

I hope they maintain voice/video calls being illegal on flights. I have no desire to be stuck in an airplane that sounds like an open floorplan office.

But please feel free to let customers browse TikTok with their headphones on.

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> But please feel free to let customers browse TikTok with their headphones on.

If my experience with trains is anything to go by then I can guarantee you that there will be at least one person doing it without the headphones and volume set to 100%.

That's a problem with saved content as well. I have yet to notice that problem on planes like it is on trains.

Although this might be because the people who plan ahead to download content are more likely to remember headphones.

I suspect it's more a function of cost and class. The people who pay $500 to fly aren't the same as the people who pay $2.50 to be on the subway, or jump the turnstile altogether.

500$ is a quite average price for the country I live in. Of course I don't mean cheap airlines, only the national ones.

> it's more a function of cost and class

A notable difference between economy and front cabin is the passengers. Mostly good: pets and kids are uncannily well behaved. Sometimes bad, e.g. more arguing.

I still can find 10$ Ryanair tickets...

The average passenger likely paid far more than $10, so I think their point stands, sort of. I would add that trains for longer than a few hours in many western countries often cost more than the typical price of a Ryanair ticket, so I’m not sure the class difference is very large in some countries.

Seems to me that anyone under age 25-ish has headphones permanently grafted to their ears. I exaggerate a bit but like young people rarely forget their phones because they notice within a few minutes that they don't have it, people are increasingly using headphones so much that they will not need to remember them.

My kids were constantly losing wallets, money, credit cards, keys, drivers licenses, etc. but none of them ever lost a phone. I expect headphones will go the same way soon.

For older folks, yeah. I often leave the house without my phone, because I go for hours at a time not using it.

I also suspect that the flight crew more actively enforcing rules than on a bus/train helps a lot.

we need to adopt more of the politeness of the japanese in this regard.

I travel some 600 km one-way to the HQ per train every month.

The correct answer is to not book second class tickets, ever, always book "first class quiet zone", and inform offending co-travellers about societally unacceptable behaviour, friendly at first, then increasingly passive-aggressive. There are always some people who are incorrigible ... but Bose N700 noise cancelling headphones also help.

I assumed the poster was talking about metro-area trains. I've never had an issue on inter-city trains.

No, I was talking about inter-city trains. We don't even have metro trains.

We actually have "quiet zones" in second class here (Netherlands), but it's a bit of a hit-and-miss type of thing. Usually when I've (politely) asked people to stfu I've gotten a reasonable reply ("oh, sorry, didn't realize"), but sometimes not so much, or just say "okay" and continue. Sometimes I don't bother because I'm not in the mood, or the people seem unlikely to be receptive.

1st class tends to be rather expensive. Depending on where you live, even 2nd class can be quite expensive.

I always wonder how these people don't feel embarrassed when their phone starts blasting out sound on a relatively quiet bus/train. I know some people would immediately mute their phone if they accidentally did that, but I suppose these people don't care.

I was in a Delta flight the other day without screens, just WiFi and a contentserver.

People let their kids watch stuff on the iPad at full blast. At least with the screens headphones HAD to be used...

Some people just don't realize there are other people around them.

Oh wow, that sounds like some special kind of hell. I sincerely hope this doesn't catch on.

TIL voice calls are illegal on flights. What about all those credit card phones you can make voice call with?

Honestly I don't think there is reason to treat airplane any different than train or bus, actually the longest journeys I've made in my life were not on plane, but on bus or train, both raking 30+ hours, while my longest direct flight was like 12 hours.

After all nobody stops you from using headphones, if you find ambient noise annoying. I much more prefer open floorplan noise over screaming baby and obviously nobody is going to ban babies/children from flying.

You can’t cancel out voice chatter very well at all using (active) noise cancelling technology.

If you prefer office noise over screaming babies, that’s one thing. They aren’t mutually exclusive however. You’ll just end up with both.

I don’t trust people’s decency enough and would prefer enforced policies banning voice calls for these reasons.

I have been waiting far too long for the subvocalization devices in SF (science/speculative fiction) to exist and become widespread. With current advances in AI/ML voice recognition I feel like we are about ready to try it, but I haven't seen any attempts yet.

Anyone know if there is a project or startup working on this?

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