The Cabin Safety Briefing

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It's iconoclasm time - perhaps this isn't the right forum - Mods?

Reading the posts about EY de-pressurising I am wondering for the 1000th time in 25 years why the sacred cow of the Cabin Safety Briefing is not laid to rest, in some corner of the ICAO offfice garden.

My credentials for proposing this are 39 years in the industry, doing just about every job possible, including for a short while until I got bored the sharp end. I have scripted the announcement several times, and discussed it with airlines and regulators, not always in Europe. I have experienced 2 emergency evacuations as a passenger from an aircraft seriously damaged on landing, but never a ditching. I reckon I have flown as a passenger on 1,000 or so single or multi-sector, short or long-haul flights, ie on average twice a month. I therefore hate shopping mall airports, but that's another issue. I once wrote a JAR Ops 1 Ops Manual for a regional airline.

Let's consider the emergency events that the briefing is about. They are ditching, loss of pressurisation and emergency evacuation on land.

Ditching

We should think about not only the risk of a flight terminating in a survivable ditching, but the secondary risk that, in that event, a life may be lost as a result of inadequate understanding of what to do among passengers. Even if the combined risk is still high enough to require a full briefing, we must then ask ourselves if, in 2007, the traditional safety briefing is better than drawing passengers' attention to a well written and drawn safety card.

De-pressurisation

Why does it take an elaborate demo to instruct people to put a mask on if it drops on their head and how to do it? A multi-lingual card with text about why it happens, and a picture, is better.

Evacuation

The typical safety briefing does not, if we are honest, really show each passenger which exit to go for from their seat, where it is, and how to get there. The FA's do a ritualistic little hand jive, and that's it. Moreover, in the event passengers must still select their exit depending on circumstances, including the location of a fire if there is one. The card shows much more clearly the layout, and can give brief instructions about not evacuating into a fire and so on, if needed.

Another little hand jive points out the floor lighting system. But does the briefing really tell someone who doesn't already know why it's there and how to use it, as in get down on your hands and knees to save your life if there's smoke in the cabin? No, in a word. There isn't the time, or the will, to tell it like it really is. Again, a safety card does it better.

Card vs Briefing

The same people who don't listen to a briefing will probably not read the card. So the argument that no-one reads the cards, therefore there must be a briefing, is a fallacy.

(It is not, incidentally, an argument against the briefing that passengers have all heard it umpteen times and never listen anyway. If there were no verbal briefing, that would cease to be the case. There are plenty of good arguments for a better form of briefing, though.)

Multi-lingual pictorial cards do the job a whole lot better, especially with those who don't have a good understanding of the languages used in the briefing. The information is clear, and passengers have plenty of time while taxying out to read them.

Cases

I don't recall any report of an emergency evacuation, where lives were not lost, in which the safety briefing was cited as the reason lives were not lost. (Although there may be one.) On the other hand, in those where lives were lost, it is highly probable that the safety briefing made no difference whatsoever to the outcome. For example; the BA engine fire on take-off at MAN. Would the loss of life been greater if a safety briefing had not been given, and passengers were told instead to read the card? I doubt it. (I'm assuming that the full safety brief was done in that case.)

That incident illustrated the case where lives can really be saved by good procedures and good passenger understanding; evacuation after a survivable accident with smoke and perhaps fire present. I submit that a card, with top-class graphics, can achieve this at least as well as and perhaps better than a rushed briefing.

Comparatives

I'll be careful here; air travel is safest because it does not take the approach of just being no less safe than other modes. But to focus on the risk factors, think of the 14 lives lost in Dusseldorf in their terrible terminal fire in the 1990s. They were all people who tried to use a lift after the alarm went off. None-the-less, I don't see ICAO insisting on a verbal safety briefing for passengers using lifts in terminals, although the risk of being caught in a terminal fire may well be at the same level as the risk of being caught in a burning aircraft, in a statistical analysis.

Trains in the UK at least are, it appears, quite dangerous due to ineffectual maintenance and no proper maintenance oversight by Directors, who are incompetent and disengaged, and expenditure cuts while revenue increases exponentially. But not only is there no safety briefing, apart from an inaudible suggestion by the PA, sometimes, that passengers should find and read a safety card, and no meaningful attempt is being made by the Government to remove the other causes I've cited. Now why is that? Because the risk is still very, very low, per passenger journey, of being injured in an accident.

Shouldn't we take the same approach, and evaluate properly the need for, and benefits and penalties of, the traditional ICAO safety briefing?

Why

In these days of fast turnrounds, cabin crew have got better things to do for the safety of passengers than waste precious minutes on giving a verbal safety briefing while pushing back and taxying out. When there's a long taxy and queue, it's not an issue, but that's only at big hubs like JFK, AMS , LHR, etc. Although the fact that it falls on deaf ears is not an argument against it, it is certainly an argument for reviewing the risks, why we do it, and whether there is a better way.