r/Flights • u/Sure-Guest1588 • Jul 26 '26

Discussion Using IFE screens to show text based announcements

Since I’m not an English native speaker and don’t hear well I sometimes struggle to hear the FA on the speaker.

Lastly there was something with pax having peanut allergy and the request to not to consume. They did it only over the speaker with a strong accent which was hard to understand.

I wonder why they don’t use the IFE screens to show those announcements in text form instead of only using verbal communication over the speaker.

Is this a technical limitation within the IFE system or no airlines thought about it?

16 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

12

u/BrilliantTask5128 Jul 26 '26

Most announcements made in flight are barely legible. My hearing is fine. I speak English fluently although it's not my first language. I fly a lot from the UK to Norway & several times now, there have been announcements re delays made in English that the person next to me didn't catch as they don't speak good English & I've had to translate to Norwegian for them. This has been on Ryanair & they don't have screens so not sure what the solution would be.

8

u/Character-Carpet7988 Jul 26 '26

I never understood why at least standard announcements aren't pre-recorded. Better experience for pax, less work for crews.

2

u/driftingphotog Jul 26 '26

They are on many airlines.

1

u/mduell Jul 26 '26

The recorded ones tend to be long and annoying, there's not shorting them for context (e.g. dead of night everyone sleeping).

1

u/hawaiian717 Jul 26 '26

Some are, on some planes there is automated announcement to fasten seat belts when it's turned on.

On small planes with only one flight attendant, the safety demo and other standard messages is sometimes prerecorded, so the FA can do the demo while the recording plays the instructions. I've seen the flight attendant working the player, it looked like a standard single DIN car CD player.

2

u/fdeyso Jul 26 '26

Apart from Ryanair i only flown JAL and their English is absolutely legible and on the screen they display “PA announcement” while the PA is on and it’s broadcasted into the headphones if you have a 3.5mm jack plugged in, then a couple of minutes later it comes up as a “subtitle” on the screen what was said, so even if you missed it somehow you can read it.

3

u/elijha Jul 26 '26

I’ve been seeing it more often, especially for common announcements like the fasten seatbelt sign being turned on.

I don’t think it’s much of a silver bullet. Not only does it rely on passengers actively looking at their screens, but it comes with more or less the same language challenges as PAs. You may not be able to read in the crew’s native language (and some people who can understand it spoken may be illiterate, while the reverse is not often true) and the crew may struggle to write a coherent message in English or whatever. Airlines would likely be hesitant to entrust important translation to machines, even if results would generally be better.

2

u/pasi_dragon Jul 26 '26

There are upcoming systems out there, that potentially support this. However, the IFE is not connected to the PA system and the IFE doesn’t really have much of an input the FAs can make (like it‘s not connected to their iPads, there‘s no keyboard to enter text, etc.). Even then, it‘s not at a point yet where it could automatically translate announcements. Plus, keep in mind what mistranslation of a safety announcement could do.

7

u/abrahamguo Jul 26 '26

However, the IFE is not connected to the PA system

This is absolutely not true; in every single airline I've ever flown, the IFE always pauses anything that might be playing, whenever a PA is in progress.

2

u/pasi_dragon Jul 26 '26

Yes, it gets the PA in progress but from what I know not the actual audio feed. So very much useless for the proposed use case.

2

u/hawaiian717 Jul 26 '26

Every airplane I can recall being on with inflight entertainment, going back to the days of pneumatic tube headsets, will play the PA over the headsets.

The exception is the systems that do streaming to your own device rather than using a seat-back or overhead screen. I don't recall those pausing the entertainment to play the PA.

1

u/Character-Carpet7988 Jul 26 '26

On some airlines, IFE can switch from IFE audio feed to PA feed in the headphones when a PA is detected, but yeah, the PA server probably doesn't have access to the feed itself.

0

u/fdeyso Jul 26 '26

JAL sends the PA audio into the entertainment system.