It seems that British Airways have updated their conditions of carriage. Passengers can no longer film, photograph or livestream cabin crew or other passengers without consent. Break the rule and you could be off the plane at the next landing, with your remaining flights cancelled, and the local authorities involved. KLM have done this for years. Virgin too. I fly Virgin regularly and the cabin announcement on every flight asks you to get permission before filming anyone else on board. So this isn't new. BA are just catching up.
My first reaction was that this should never have needed writing down. It's basic courtesy. You don't point a camera at a stranger, or at the family in the row across, without asking. We all know this on the ground. Somehow at 35,000 feet a chunk of the travelling public seem to forget.
A quick word on the law, because it gets misunderstood. In the UK, filming in a public place where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy is generally legal. I used to do photography professionally, so I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about this.
But "public place" is more nuanced than people assume. It isn't just anywhere the public can walk into. Sports stadiums, theatres, theme parks, gig venues, even some shopping centres. They're all ticketed or conditional spaces, and the conditions of entry routinely include filming restrictions. Next time you go to a match or a concert, have a read of the back of your ticket. You'll be surprised. An aircraft cabin is the same logic. You bought a ticket. The conditions came with it. The airline gets to set the rules.
And even where filming is legal, "legal" and "fine" aren't the same thing. Kids are the obvious one. Just because you can point a lens at a stranger's child in a park doesn't mean you should.
Then I caught myself. Because as a vlogging PPL holder, I point a camera at people in aeroplanes for a living. Sort of. So what's my code?
It's pretty simple. I always ask instructors before I film a flight with them. Always. And if they say not, then I don't ask why. I can understand a working instructor not wanting to be all over YouTube. They're doing a job. The camera is my hobby. Those two things don't get to outrank each other.
There's a softer version of the same rule for training flights. If I'm there as a student rather than as the pilot in command, the camera goes away unless we've talked about it first. I'm there to learn. The instructor is there to teach. Neither of us is there to make content. That bit matters.
Pilot in Command (PIC) and with my own passengers it's a different story. KK is my plane. Well a fifth of it is. I film what I like in her. And Caz is wifey. We film each other all the time. That's just the deal.
The BA story is being framed as a crackdown. It isn't really. It's just a big airline writing down what Virgin have been saying over the PA for years. Ask first. Accept no. Move on.
If you're a student pilot reading this and you're tempted to stick a GoPro on the dash for your next lesson, here's the only advice I'll give. Ask. If the answer is yes, brilliant. If the answer is no, that's the end of it. You'll learn more without the camera anyway.
Written in the cafe at Elstree, opposite Caz and her Snowgies. She runs Addicted to Disney. We're both in the content game. She didn't ask before I took this photo. She's wifey. That's the deal.
