NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language) user here. One of the reasons why you might not see many signing on planes is that people often travel alone. Whenever I travel alone I tend to not sign much (for hopefully obvious reasons!). I do sign "thank you", "water please", etc when I need to with FAs just to raise awareness that they have Deaf passengers.

When travelling on QF I have found their FA to be pretty good at responding back to me with a "thank you" sign. I've been told they send their FA to Deaf Awareness courses and this shows. Sadly I don't see the same on NZ/JQ which I travel on more often -- perhaps they don't send their FAs to Deaf Awareness courses?

Obviously when travelling in a group of other SL users I will sign a lot! Doesn't happen very often though.

Interesting to read the debate between ASL and SSE here. I grew up with TC (the Australian version of SSE) and while I agree it is good for English literacy it does not always translate to better comprehension of what is being said. Basically TC/SSE allows a better understanding of English but not really anything else.

While I was growing up in school in the '90's I witnessed the transition in education to teaching NZSL (which like BSL/ASL in terms of the fact it is its own language) and many of my classmates finally started to understand maths, science, social studies, etc because they stopped focusing on English and just focusing on acquiring knowledge from the subject they were learning.

I was fortunate firstly to have acquired TC, but I feel much more fortunate to have NZSL later on as it is a proper sign language. TC/SSE is just a code for English and IMHO should only be used for teaching/learning English. ASL/BSL/NZSL/etc is more appropriate for almost everything else.

- James