score:12
Occasionally useful, mostly irrelevant.
Some in-flight entertainment systems have USB ports that let you connect your own device and then play your own movies from said device on the IFE screen. Allowing access to your files would thus be necessary to be able to browse them through the IFE system.
More often, there is no such feature and the USB port is purely meant to be used as a charger. For reasons like supporting proper current negotiation (necessary for various fast charging protocols), the USB port might not be completely dumb (having just the power lines like a wall wart charger) but actually be a valid USB device with working data lines.
Any time you connect your phone to a real USB device, it pops up the dialog asking you whether you want to actually present the file access protocols to the device or to just play dead. The device does not need to "ask to access data" first, the phone asks you before it even offers the data access features to the device.