ContinentalFan

onthesam

That's it. From here on out I'm only flying in cargo jets.

In2ishn

ExplorerWannabe

In that case, you'll open the window shade when I ask you to because I want natural light to better enable my adjustment to local timing and so I can look out the window when the pilot announces that we're passing over Greenland and some beautiful fjords?
Before the prevalence of tablets and smartphones, FAs would often request everyone lower their shades as the movie was coming on but people who wanted to look at the scenery weren't harassed either. To the best of my knowledge, the sun hasn't gotten brighter over the past 30-40 years.

A lot of people in this thread are assuming what THEY want is what the whole cabin wants when the reality is most people affected don't bother questioning the FAs regardless of whether they're asked to open or close the windows. Personally, I close the blinds at home unless/until I want to look outside but I do that for privacy. At work, I close the blinds to keep my office from heating up. When I'm flying in a window seat, I like to open the window when I'm passing over interesting scenery, especially when the pilot makes a point of mentioning it.

mapleg

I have actually been on planes where a few pax have indeed been that selfish.

daisyatl

Maybe I am misunderstanding. I guess I am trying to understand if the people who want the shade open also sleep with the shade open. Or do they lower the shade for when THEY want to sleep.

WineCountryUA

There is an excessive amount of personal comments occurring in this thread. "selfish", "rude", ... comments especially applied to other posters are not in the FT spirit or the FT rules. While we can disagree on this situation, there is no need for name-calling. State your opinion, allow others, the same, to state their opinion.

Keep in mind
WineCountryUA
UA coModerator

FLYMSY

Charley4

I think the advice was correct. Here you can not please everyone. In complete darkness, someone would not be comfortable, imagine yourself in his place.

TemboOne

It's really funny to see some of the comments on here, and the fact that anyone who "wants their own way" - whether it's blinds up or down (or shades adjusted by the SD "their" way) is always being called selfish and inconsiderate.

The logic of course is that if you want the shades open or under your control, choose a window seat. If you want the shades open and also want to be considerate then do choose a window seat where you will be on the opposite side to the sun.

For North Americans on the TATL flights use the PO-SH logic to be in the shade both ways. For TPAC it's the opposite!

On the other hand, if you want the blind closed choose an appropriate seat.

One aspect that is lost in this discussion is that being constantly confined in an overly dark tube can have very negative health effects on some people over a period of time!

We have never found AC to be overly aggressive in control of the 788/789 windows.

Thanks ACYYZ/SD

jah718

Is it not also selfish to force people to close their blinds if they want to look outside? If you want control of the window shades, then pick a window seat....

Also, I don't appreciate being forced into darkness when it is my day time hours. Fair enough if it is our night time and it is time to sleep, I don't have any issue with people wanting the blinds closed.

My view is that both opening the blind and closing the blind is selfish in some way, so there is really no good answer to that question.

MT_Switch

Next time everyone in that section of the cabin should do a vote, it's not an overwhelming number of pax to count so majority wins.

sincx

While I personally prefer a dark cabin, forcing window seat passengers to put the window shades down effectively makes window seats an even worse version of middle seats--no view and you need to squeeze by 2 people to get to the aisle. The saving grace of a window seat is being able to see out of the window, so if that's taken away then it doesn't seem fair to the window seat pax.

Baley

etiene

I see what you did there ;-) You are making a huge assumption that you are in the majority here [at least to the extent that you claim]: it seems vastly more likely that most don't particularly care. I suspect most tend to close the shades because that makes watching the IFE easier, and most will do much more of that than watching the scenery - especially on transocean sectors. This is likely where the encouragement from FAs comes from too [and as mentioned above from the pre-AVOD days] - plus I think it is generally suggested that a darker cabin tends to promote less service demands than a light one.

Personally I dislike the tendency towards blacked out aircraft on longhaul, especially a day-time flight East to West. West to East can be much trickier - but I certainly don't think the blacked out cabin on DOH-AKL helped with jetlag [flight was ~2am-5am+1 when I took it].

About the only scenario where I can think of where I can justify the autonomy of the window seat dweller being infringed would be a W>E redeye - where having a "night" period of several hours [obvs dependent on sector length] enforced on the cabin would be sensible even if the plane passes into daylight. Alongside partial adjustment of the shades to avoid imposing screen glare where possible.