Safety demos
 

I think that most (all?) airlines use the "recorded" (what is the correct term?) safety demo, when available (typically LH routes, aircraft equipped with individual screens at every seat). I would be curious to know, how often is this demo compromised by the poor quality of the recording? And in these cases, how often it is decided to "fallback" to the traditional "manual" safety demo? I was quite surprised to see one case when this did not happen. (Do I think it matters? I don't know, probably not too much, but...)

I was on a bmi flight last year where the safety demo video failed, and the crew had to revent to a manual demo. It was a shambles - I suspect they don't do it as often as they probably should :/

When I was at MON on the video equipped a/c we did manual out & video back, or vice versa......or something like that :E

cheers ;)
FF

I believe Virgin have to do the demo at least once a month in order to stay familiar with it, maybe a few VS crew could confirm this. If so its a very clever idea.
At BA I reckon I do it maybe once every 2 or 3 months because either the whole system goes down, the CSD still cant figure out the video system ( :} ) or a few rows are not working. Mind you, I did very recently have to witness a single crew member taking it upon themselves to follow the Video Demo with his lifejacket, seatbelt, demo card and o2 mask for the sake of two passengers whos PTV's werent working! It looked utterly unprofessional as the video demo was not really made to be followed by the crew. What the crew member really should have done was gone down to them afterwards and given them a personal brief which would have only taken a moment!!!
BTW...How many of you have seen the new BA Safety Demo yet?? I think its cool, thank god they changed it from the Shoulder Pad wearing 80's fest which we had for far too long!!! Although I do miss chuckling at the early versions of mobile phones and laptops which they had on the old video!!!

At Bmi you do the demo once a month.

Yes paddy your right, we do a manual demo on every flight of the last week of every month, plus we also cover it breifly every SEP. because of the frequency we have to do this i dont think we look out of practice or unproffesional when our tv monitors are down and we are required to do last minute manual demos. Maybe others may beg to differ but i have never witnessed cufuffle and confusion in these situations on any of my flights.

Bmed always do it manually

Qantas use a pre recorded video plus the crew also demonstrate at the same time. If for whatever reason the video goes bung, we have a backup audio system and if that goes bung the CSM will read out the demo.

Because we always do the demonstration it doesn't matter if it goes pear shaped because we do it everytime!

It is disappointing that so many people think that the safety briefing does so much to improve the safety of a flight. I believe that the briefing is more theatre than content. The best ever briefing I've ever witnessed was when the regulars did it themselves and those who didn't participate criticised those who did. Everybody was properly briefed before departure. However, this would be difficult to do on every flight. What is really needed is to engage the minds of the passengers as part of the brief. Something which most briefings don't do.

Not sure I agree totally with your view piltdown man.

If pax choose not to listen or watch it then it serves no purpose but stopping short of clamping their eyes open and parading up and down the aisle with a sergeant majors stick we cant help that. If the pax do watch and listen then should something happen the info is in their long term memory and some of it maybe not all will help to possibly save their life. It only needs to be remembering that an exit might be behind you and that would be enough to stop a mass stampede to the front door.

Although you raise an interesting point, the demo is a bit boring to the masses, so what could we do instead that takes the same time.............any ideas folks?

6

But, why do the briefing then? In addition, if as crew you believe (rightly or not) that most PAX don't care, it does not really motivate you to capture people's attention. Without the video, from some seats it is not always possible to see the demo without adopting an unnatural position (what would you do if one day you saw 70 heads popping up from behind the seats to watch :)
Slightly off-topic (?) when the guy next to me uses his phone during final approach in bad weather (yes it happened!) then I do become a little nervous...