Delta CEO: No Voice Calls on Our Flights | Hacker News Reader

Delta CEO: No Voice Calls on Our Flights

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39 pointskudu48 comments

I'm not a big fan of people who are always on their phones but I don't think disallowing them on planes really solves any actual real world problem. Those chatterboxes who need to be talking will just continue to annoy the stranger sitting next to them or chatterbox with their friend sitting next to them if they are travelling in a group. Either way I need to filter them out with headphones or whatever.

And while I have no interest in spending the majority of even a short flight talking on phones, it would sometimes be very convenient to be able to make a quick call to someone waiting at the airport 10 minutes before a flight lands or something like that. Throwing out that sort of convenience to get rid of a distraction like someone talking on their phone in an environment that is already inherently full of really loud sound distractions seems like a silly move to me.

The guy behind me on the train this morming was traveling by himself. Other than the 15 minutes he spent loudly participating in a settlement conference call (violating client confidentiality I might add) he was perfectly quiet. There was no evidence that he was a compulsive chatterbox, he just found it convienient to take a call right then and didn't care how many people he bothered.

While it is true that other people have been very annoying on the train by talking to each other it is not true that banning telephone calls would have no salutary effect.

If you'd been travelling with SJ (Swedish railway) you could have chosen a quiet section, where cell phones are expected to be turned off and even conversations are discouraged.

http://www.sj.se/sj/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=189&a=34903&l=en

SNCF (The French railway company) specifically asks you by signage and by loudspeaker announcement to leave the car and make phone calls in the intersection between cars on their TGV trains.

Amtrak in the US has Quiet Cars. I was once thrown out of one for laughing too loud.

In my experience (every day for 14 months in the quiet section), some people don't give a rat's ass though, and ignore the signs and plaques. It wasn't uncommon to see/hear sub 10-yo kids there either, and woe unto you if you attempt to explain to the parent that they are sitting in a quiet section. The ultimate fault is of course on SJ for not making it more obvious that the booked seats are in the quiet section during the booking process, however.

Dutch railways has silent carriages too. Most people don't notice / care, but when told off they usually move or shut up :-)

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... (Google Translate)

One could always resort to childish antics such as cell phone crashing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA1J-raGinQ

Hearing only half a conversation is actually more grating than hearing a full conversation according to research (and my own personal experience):

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/09/03/095679761038...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=its...

And if flights are anything like Amtrak, people WILL take the opportunity to have 3 hour phone conversations when they're on a trip if they can.

Fortunately trains can be separated in to quiet cars.

Be that as it may, I conjecture that most of the annoyance is from people's instincts that they need to talk so loudly, especially when they have trouble hearing what coming out of the phone. In fact, shouting doesn't help at all and anything much more than a whisper doesn't really help.

Send a text instead.

Oh, irony, is it the same Delta that had phones installed in all headrests that had credit card slot and some ridiculous fee to make a call just mere 10-15 years ago?

CEO, attendants and passengers didn't mind back then.

I think that they should install roaming cell phone station in every plane and charge $1/min, all providers will jump on that. Then it will sort itself out economically - it will to expensive to chat a lot, but still affordable if there is a strong need to do so.

I feel like the service would be spotty enough that it would only work around takeoff and landing anyway. I've accidentally left my phone on several times while flying and never had service. Not sure if it was due to the altitude/speed or just the fact that 99% of the land you fly over is empty.

As happens elsewhere in the world, this would quite clearly entail having a microcell on board.

When did all customers become "users". Delta has passengers. Delta has customers. They do not have users.

This is the #1 comment? It's kind of irrelevant.

By the way, Delta doesn't use the word 'user' in the original memo.

http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=2206

Seems to me like most airlines stand to gain a lot of money by creating new sections that allow for talking within the planes, and ones that don't. People would probably pay extra for the latter.

Not sure you can really do that. Even if it's a space with 4-8 seats sectioned off. If they're all planning on talking on the phone, I could see that being annoying for eachother. Otherwise if they were completely sealed off sections, they'd be charging a small fortune to compensate for the lost seat revenue.

If it helps, I'd pay good money to have a front row seat if they had a section right next to the section where all the folks who can't wrap their brains around not talking for 3 hours are forced to all sit and drive each other insane.

Way to make the whole flying experience even more awesome.

I'm all for booths though, where you could isolate yourself if you really need to call and where calls would be limited in duration.

It would seem more fair to charge for the privilege of making calls (either access to a talking area, or a seat in a talking area).

But, of course it would probably be an easier sell to say "hey, pay an extra $50 so that you don't have to be bothered by asshats screaming on their phone!"

Close your eyes and picture the last time you saw a clueless chatterbox gabbing on a cell phone. What do you remember? The nails-on-chalkboard voice? The hideous oversharing? Think deeper. Think of the flapping hands and the upper body articulation. Think of how oblivious that chatterbox was to any social cues, subtle or overt, that the world at large might not wish to share quite so deeply in its private discourse. Now imagine you're trapped 17" away (average distance between passengers' centers of mass on an international flight) from that clueless gesticulating chatterbox for 8 hours. If you honestly think that's no problem I won't call you a hypocrite. For me, cell phone chats go right down with cigarettes and guns as things that are so awful that even trapped air passengers shouldn't have to endure them.

Thing is, I can't picture the last time I saw a clueless chatterbox gabbing on a cell phone.

I dunno who these people are I'm supposed to be afraid of. The face of the enemy is not known to me.

Charge a not-inconsequential fee for in-air calls so that people only use it if it's absolutely necessary. Perhaps make the charge go up exponentially with time so that calls remain brief.

In many planes people can't make them now. Why is it suddenly absolutely necessary?

That's exactly how it used to be with the in-flight air phones (except the exponential part, it wasn't needed with calls costing $10 a minute).

This is a huge advantage when you're trying to win business from curmudgeons like me.

My favorite instances of transit chatterboxes have occurred in Italy. Pedestrians and those on trains, on their phone and very "vocal" with their hand gestures. It made for amusing people watching.

Personally, I don't care either way about voice calls on flights at this point. Aside from when my wife and I are traveling and trying to converse, I am usually fully checked out with my in ear monitors and music/video, so I rarely hear much -- I have to remove the IEM to interact w/ airline staff for things like drinks, food, etc.

Flights should be like movie theaters when it comes to using your phone. Don't spoil the ambiance for everyone with your chatter. A message is fine. But for voice, kindly step out.

Step out of the plane ? :) More seriously, if people have to move to make a call, this will cause a mess in the economy section, where seats are narrow and you need to step on people's feet to move around. And that will make the job of air hostesses way harder when it comes to moving around with their carts, too.

There's hardly a good way to do that in a plane.

Ahh, the lovely ambiance of a passenger plane.

If you are dying to talk on a plane (unless it's an emergency), please use this to respect the comfort of other passengers.

http://www.ostrichpillow.com/wp-content/themes/things/img/he...

Can you actually get a cell signal in an airplane? I guess you can or this wouldn't be an issue. I've never been able too in the few moments before I turn airplane mode on.

Delta has wifi on some flights, so there's always Skype.

This was an interesting and quaint sentiment in 1993. Now it's an attitude shared by overbearing grandmas and hipsters alike.

The culture police need to move on. I don't like loud conversations, but it's a jet plane - not a damn library. (And at least my librarian does not infantilize me)

That talking on the phone or the train or the bus is rude isn't some quaint notion that is going to go away. It's very grating to listen to a lot of one sided conversations, and planes are places that a lot of people like to sleep.

Yes, and traffic is annoying too. I nonetheless want to have motorized vehicles. I'd similarly like to use my cellphone and want for other adults to make that decision for themselves. If other people irritate me, then I'll go buy some earplugs.

But really, it's a jet plane. Jet engines are really quite loud. Who expects silence on a plane? (nevermind the crying babies, captain announcements, odd two-sided conversations, etc...)

Maybe the best retort to my comment is simply "then don't fly Delta because their customers don't want cellphones on planes."

And I'd really like to travel without the annoyance of hearing other passengers loudly talking on the phone next to me. An airline that enforced a no phone call policy would be more desirable to me, all things being equal. Perhaps some will allow it and some won't, and we all can have choices. Also, jet engine being loud not the same as distinctly loud talking. More like a uniform white noise that does not prevent sleeping.

Ultimately I think it just comes down to consideration for others and not being irritating during a long uncomfortable plane ride. I would presume most people would prefer to not listen to others talking and prefer silence. Therefore I think it's just inconsiderate to carry on a loud conversation within a plane where people are forced to have to put up with it and can't avoid the irritation.

Yeah, you're right about the choices. (However, I suspect that Delta's position is bad business in the long run.)

This just seems like such a dated and irrelevant stand for Delta to take. Cellphones are here to stay. We live in crowded spaces and it's time for everyone to simply get used to the sound of other humans.

I have no idea why everyone places value on public silence. Is this a holdover cultural strain from the 19th century? Silence is so cheap and so easy to obtain. (And who wants to be the one to make rules which essentially say "shhhh!")

Everybody has their preferences I guess, but I couldn't disagree with you more. I think because cellphones are ubiquitous and used everywhere and always, silence and being able to not have to hear other humans talking on them for a couple hours is a small consolation.

Traveling is uncomfortable. Avoiding one aspect of that discomfort by allowing for some peace and quiet is a minor short term inconvenience for the few people that feel the need to talk on the phone around complete strangers. How about texting.. wouldn't that suffice? Then it would seem both parties could be happy... the callers could get their message across and those that prefer silence wouldn't have to hear it.

To tell you the truth, my preference is strongly against cell phones. I don't even have a voice plan.

The thing is that I simply respect other adults enough to let them decide whether it's ok to make a phone call. We're all adults, we all know that loud phone calls are disturbing, and we all might one day have a great reason to make a loud phone call. Sure, there are some rude people, but why let them spoil adulthood for the rest of us?

To put it another way, large institutions should not concern themselves with matters of human etiquette. Rules intended to preserve good manners are almost always more harmful than good. Mundane human relations should be as informal as possible - any time constant formalization of our interactions is an impediment to progress.

There's a very large difference between white noise and conversation. I'm pretty surprised that I have to point that out. Then again, you're arguing that we should become less considerate as a society.

Or perhaps that the silence mongers should become more considerate.

And white noise tends to drown out human voices. I'm pretty surprised that I have to point that out.

It doesn't drown them out very effectively at the distances you're dealing with in a plane, and cell phones would be worse as people would be talking louder than normal into them. I stepped off a plane an hour ago, and I'm absolutely sure that your proposal would make an already somewhat unpleasant process much worse.

Silence in public places is a coping strategy for crowded environments - it's the least intrusive thing you can do to the other people in your space. It's like the difference between jumping around and shuffling quietly when you're in the middle of a crowd - one may be more fun for the person jumping around, but it's selfish, because it makes everyone else's experience less fun, as their toes get mashed on.

That's really the crux of it. Talking on your cell phone when you're mashed up against other people is a purely selfish act. That's why it will always be considered rude.

White noise is a more effective sound barrier in small spaces like planes. This is why the captain's announcements must be broadcast in very high-pitched tones.

Perhaps someone's need for a phone call is more important than my desire for quiet. I don't know, it's completely irrelevant to me because I don't go around looking for things to get offended about.

As a sidenote, I could make your same basic argument about crying babies, and yet nobody would take me seriously if I proposed a ban on babies.

I don't think that your librarian needs to "infantilize" you. You're doing a fine job all by yourself.

Is that a new word for you or something?

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