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Old 9th Sep 2015, 18:53
  #215 (permalink)  
Backseat Dane
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Denmark
Age: 55
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PAX carrying stuff from planes

All this talk about prosecuting passengers who in the panic of evacuating a damaged plane grab their carry-ons is ... rubbish.

Does anybody here really, honestly, believe that it'll do anything good? (Besides the legalese - at least in Denmark you'll have to establish some sort of intent to do harm or at the very least gross negligence on behalf of the passenger in order to take the case to court - and in all honesty: How is that going to be done under the given circumstances?)

I'm not a pilot but I have been deployed as a soldier and as a soldier you train, you train, you train. Someone said it upthread: Train hard, fight easy. Or train as you fight, fight as you train.

But PAX don't train for an evacuation. Best they'll listen to the safety instructions, read the safety folder, find the nearest exit and try to remember. But they haven't done the drill in a dark cabin, half filled with smoke, flames engulfing the fuselage and people screaming and panicking to add to the stress.

Soldiers don't know how they'll react in an actual combat situation until they see combat. Luckily I haven't been there myself. An aircraft crew won't know how it'll react to an actual emergency before it's seen one. But: The more you train, the harder you train, the better you'll perform if the **** hits the fan - this crew seems to have done an outstanding job and cudos to the crew and BA for that.

The point is: Training. Crews do, PAX don't. Accept this as a fact and then strive to improve the briefings, the information given when purchasing tickets, when orders are given to evacuate. Perhaps reduce the amount and size of carry-ons. Whatever. But do not think that merely prosecuting some dude will have PAX all over the world rationally thinking - in a situation of emergency, of panic - that "Oh noes, I better not take that carry-on with me, 'cause then I'll get prosecuted". Just doesn't work that way.
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