Passengers on a recent Qantas flight from Sydney to Tokyo Haneda had to endure what one customer described as a “super uncomfortable” experience after a racy adult-themed movie was played on every screen.
To make matters worse, there was no way to pause or stop the movie which contained nudity and sexually explicit text messages showing up on the screen.
The incident occurred during flight QF59 to Tokyo when the inflight entertainment stopped working properly. There was no way for passengers to select individual movies to watch so it was up to the cabin to select a movie that would be played simultaneously on every single screen.
According to the passenger, the cabin crew asked passengers what movie they would like to be screened, and somehow, they landed on the 2023 title Daddio, which stars Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.
The plot centers around a woman taking a cab ride from New York JFK to Manhattan, with Johnson’s character striking up a conversation with the cab driver, played by Penn.
During the movie, the woman reveals she is having an affair with an older, married man and from their the pair start revealing increasingly revealing secrets about their lives.
“Qantas played an inappropriate movie to the whole plane, there was no way to turn it off,” one passenger shared in a post on social media site Reddit.
The passenger says that the inflight entertainment system was already broken when they boarded the plane, but after a failed attempt to get it back up and working resulted in a one-hour delay, the flight departed anyway.
Rather than being able to select from a library of content to watch on demand, the system would only allow cabin crew to select an individual movie that would be shown on every single screen across the aircraft.
“It was impossible to pause, dim, or turn it off. Here’s the kicker: the movie they played was extremely inappropriate,” the passenger continued in their Reddit post. “It featured graphic nudity and a lot of sexting – the kind where you could literally read the texts on screen without needing headphones.”
When the cabin crew initially became aware of the inappropriate nature of the film, they first tried to help customers turn off their screens but it soon became apparent that this wasn’t possible.
An hour into the movie, the crew finally changed the movie to a more child-friendly title.
In a statement, Qantas confirmed the incident did happen and said that its internal processes should have ensured that the crew had selected a child-friendly movie in the first place.
“The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight, and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience,” the airline said in a statement.
The uncomfortable inflight experience occurred on one of Qantas’ aging Airbus A330 aircraft, which still has a legacy inflight entertainment system installed. Unfortunately, these older systems are a lot more susceptible to faults.
