Airline Apologizes After Graphic Film Plays On Every Screen During Flight
Once the movie started, it was “impossible to pause, dim, or turn it off,” according to one alleged passenger.
Airline passengers were floored after a racy film played on all the plane’s screens during a recent Qantas flight from Sydney to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
The Australian airline said passengers were unable to choose movies individually on the Oct. 5 flight due to technical problems, so crew members selected a film for the entire cabin from a small list of options.
“Our crew members had a limited list of movies that they were able to play across all screens on the aircraft and based on the request from a number of passengers, a particular movie was selected for the entire flight,” Qantas said in a statement to NBC News on Tuesday.
Qantas did not specify in its statement which film was shown, but multiple passengers posted photos of their screens showing Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn’s R-rated drama “Daddio.”
According to the U.S. Motion Pictures Association, “Daddio,” directed by Christy Hall and released in 2023, is rated R “for language throughout, sexual material and brief graphic nudity.”
A person on Reddit claiming to have been a passenger on the flight wrote that “Daddio” contained a “lot of sexting” and travelers had no way to prevent it from playing.
“It was impossible to pause, dim, or turn it off,” this person wrote on Reddit, alongside images of explicit texts shown in the film. “The movie they played was extremely inappropriate. It featured graphic nudity and a lot of sexting ― the kind where you could literally read the texts on screen without needing headphones.”
The alleged passenger said the incident was “super uncomfortable, especially with families and kids onboard,” and said it took the airline “almost an hour” to replace the film with “a more kid-friendly movie.”
HuffPost has reached out to Qantas for comment.
The airline said in a statement that the cabin crew unsuccessfully tried to fix the screens for passengers who complained.
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“The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience,” a Qantas spokesperson said in a statement, per NBC News.
After the technical difficulty was fixed, “all screens were changed to a family friendly movie for the rest of the flight,” the airline said. “We are reviewing how the movie was selected.”
Qantas passengers experienced a separate hiccup on Oct. 2 when a plane headed from Sydney to Wellington, New Zealand, was forced to turn back only an hour into the flight after reports of an “unusual smell” in the cabin.
After the plane landed safely, one crew member was taken to the hospital with undisclosed symptoms, Fox Business reports. No passengers or pilots were reportedly affected.
