Safety Brief - Life Jackets

[pulse1]

Following the successful ditching of the Airbus 320 in the Hudson, I wondered if any CC have noticed any passengers paying more attention to the brief this morning.

[13 please]

From what I've read elsewhere, apparently not. Busy reading about the incident in their paper, during the safety video..!!

[jerrytug]

Hi folks I hope your customers will pay more attention to the lifejacket instructions. I`m thinking as a sailor,it`s very difficult to keep sight of a floating person in the water when you are trying to pick them up from a boat or ship,whistles are a lifesaver,red/orange/yellow clothes /and any light or stroby thing after dark or in poor viz. What you guys demo. is nautical survival stuff,you`ve got to get them to imagine they are floating in cold water and hoping to be seen. Best of British! Regards on a good news day Jerry P.S what made me post this was imagining if it had sunk in the Hudson.

[wirgin blew]

Pulse we have live tvs in our seats and most pax busy watching the replay's on tv. To get their attention we switch it off in the safety demo but they were probably more interested in seeing what had happened and feeling safe because it wasn't them as opposed to being prepared incase it becomes them.

:ok:

[pink27]

I found that on all my flights yesterday that everybody stopped to pay attention...interestingly though I had a one pax onboard who had been on my flight the day before. On that flight after my demo he stopped me when I was securing the cabin to tell me that "if it gets to the stage when we have to land on water we won't survive so what's the point in explaining how to use a lifejacket that won't do the slightest bit of use"...funnily enough he remained very quite the next day! He is a regular pax and on every flight he always has something to say in regard to some aspect of airline crews job thinking he knows better.

[SouBE]

In answer to your question....no. They're still to busy sending emails on their blackberry's or laptops despite having already been told 3 times to turn them off. It does make you wonder what it will take to really make people take notice - particularly those who travel regularly and think they know it all.

[Seat62K]

I would have thought passengers' attitudes to the safety briefing are, generally speaking, similar to what I experienced flying Ryanair shortly after the Rome incident: no difference!

I believe, though, that lack of attentiveness, chatting etc. might be due, in part, to some passengers not understanding the language used during the briefing.

[baba99]

As SLF on 3 segments yesterday on 3 different types, the one thing I did double check (having read other posts on PPrune) was which doors to use/not use in a water landing. Not all safety cards make any distinction between water and land emergency landing, in which case I presumed they're the same (I think for my first segment, OZ 737 it explicitly indicated that all four doors could be used.)

I wonder whether, in case some doors are *not* to be opened in case of a ditching, this should be highlighted during the safety demo...

This is one case where it definitely needs to be highlighted that not all aircraft are the same type, even if it "looks" the same (A320 vs. 737, etc.)

[SouBE]

It's a good point and on many a/c types in a ditching it should be the forward doors that are used. However, the final distinction between which doors to use/not to use in a ditching or emergency landing remains with the cabin crew - and that distinction has to be made on the day taking into account the individual circumstances. Making that distinction on a safety card is not good practice as every emergency situation must be weighed up on it's on situation.

[EYXW]

Primary escape route on an A320 or 737 is the over wing exits as the likelihood is that the main doors will be partially submerged. That said a 737 is designed to sit bottom down in the water - it is therefore generally taught that after evacuation onto the wings a crew member may re-enter the aircraft blow slides at doors 1 and use them as further flotation devices (yeah right) Same principal on A320 from outside you should be able to ascertain whether doors are submerged or not and then re-enter a/c and blow slides.

Quite frankly that's why I have generally only worked at airlines where big planes go over big water!