Trouble afoot as airline passengers play space invaders

Barefoot airline passengers are becoming the norm, overstepping the bounds of polite behaviour.

The instagram page @passengershaming exposes yet another misuse of an armrest during a flight.

The clip is chilling. Stephen King couldn’t have crafted a more skin-tingling scene.

I am talking about the recent viral video of an airline passenger using their bare big toe to swipe across their personal TV screen. In the clip, which was posted by Twitter user Erik Olvera on January 1, the sockless flyer toe-scrolls through the movie options with a disturbing level of ease.

I almost, almost, admire how little this passenger seems to care about her exposed tootsies. But should I be so surprised by this sockless wonder? Not at all, according to Shawn Kathleen, the former flight attendant behind the over one-million-follower Instagram account @PassengerShaming. (She goes by her first name to maintain partial anonymity).

The account is a catalogue of ludicrous on-plane behaviours, as witnessed and submitted by fellow travellers and flight attendants.

Recently, Shawn Kathleen has received a high volume of foot-­related footage.

Her account contains a video of a passenger who dried their shoe using the overhead air vent; ­another of someone picking at his bare heel; and a third of someone who hitched a sockless foot up on the armrest.

But how did we get to the point where bare hoofs are the norm in the sky?

“There’s a really strong sense of entitlement where people are like, ‘Hey, I paid X amount of money for this plane ticket so I can treat this aircraft as I wish’,” Shawn Kathleen says in a phone interview.

And it doesn’t stop at simply brandishing a bare foot.

Passengers now throw their feet up on tray tables, inside the seat-back pocket and even on someone else’s seat.

That’s precisely what happened to AJ Henning, 38, a teacher in Santa Barbara, California. On a recent flight to Hawaii, a seatmate “thought it was cool to take her shoes off and then put her bare feet” on his young son’s seat. He said something to the woman, who eventually removed her feet. “The lack of thinking of others was what got me,” says Henning.

Bare feet exemplify a “whatever” boorishness that many passengers carry on board. With each passing year, “the attire for travel becomes more and more casual and so the environment has become more casual at the same time,” says Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert and former flight attendant.

Furry pyjamas and drawstring sweats are common travel gear today and airlines have had recent incidents with allegedly improperly dressed passengers. In July, a Houston doctor claimed to have nearly been booted off a Miami-bound flight for wearing a one-piece romper.

Also in July, a British traveller reported that she was forced off a flight for wearing a revealing, lacy top.

I could find no incidents of passengers being hassled for going sockless in the cabin. Yet many major carriers explicitly state that bare feet are grounds for removal from a flight.

With those rigid guidelines in mind, slipping out of one’s shoes is perfectly fine, says Swann. “Some people do that for health reasons and it’s recommended by their doctors so I most certainly would say that is acceptable.”

Yet your stockinged feet “should be on the floor and in your area”, not crawling up the window or crashing into your seatmate’s bloody mary.

And if you’re just wearing socks, don’t ever wander off to the bathroom. As Shawn Kathleen says, what you think is water on the floor is most often not.

The Wall Street Journal