Just one point... crew demonstrate how to fasten a seatbelt but more importantly how to OPEN it.

The problem is that some pax complain when CC try to inject humor or make the briefing palatable. Some feel this makes light of serious information.

I think others complain because the laughter/applause drowns out their last few seconds of stinky hip-hop before they *should* be stowing their iPod-thingies for take-off.

(Those, by the way, are the folks I - and prolly OyYou - will be pushing aside or walking over on the way out, unless they're also moving in the same direction. I don't have time for Darwin Award hopefuls on the ground, let alone in the air.)


I still find it amazing that there were no fatalities, all things considered. I don't consider it a miracle - Sulley and his #1 used skill and experience to make a perfect water landing, but there was nearly nothing perfect about the evac.

And yet, most of "us" (not necessarily us here) won't take the 5 minutes to listen to a safety spiel.


Exactly.

Also, some CC include important tips that don't seem important on first blush, but can be crucial when the sh!t hits the fan:

"And please notice that the overwing exits are smaller, those of you who are not with the circus will have to duck to avoid hitting your head against this aircraft-grade alumiwhatsit." (Heard this years ago on a CO flight.)


The thing which really p!sses me off is that being in a group of people which holds a few who have NO regard for safety brings down the survivability for all of us. It will take ALL of us working together to get out of an aircraft in a crash situation, and there are no drills for doing so - all we have are the spiels and common sense.


Fortunately, I don't have to fly as often as I did in the past. As much as I love the airline industry, the next time I fly I'm going to try to book on a private jet looking for a few pax to offset positioning costs.

As a new poster I may well get lynched for this (metaphorically, of course) but I kind-of sympathise with the comment about over-use of the PA system in general, having just got back from a Jet2 holiday where it felt like the role of CC was as much about sales as anything else. I understand that the budget airlines bump up their profits with onboard sales but I can sympathise with people tuning out announcements when it's more likely to be the nth reminder about the fantastic range of food / drinks / fragrances / scratchcards than something genuinely important such as, you know, safety.

Hi rachel welcome to PPrune from a CC member who loiters in this forum. It gives me perspective from the other side of my operation.

The role of CC in the eyes of the CAA is totally safety. In their eyes we can sit down for the whole flight other than to adress safety related issues.

Our employers however have a different view. Depending on your carrier we are on board to give a certain standard of service on a legacy/flag carrier.

They don't like us sitting down waiting for the very rare (thankfully) evacuation/decompression/fire/medical to come along. The common safety issues such as turbulance/cabin secure we can handle in a few minutes so in our employers eyes we are expensive for the rest of the time unless we are doing something else.

In the loco sector that is sales, sales and more sales to boost company profits. I know I am an SCCM for easyjet.

If I don't drive my crew/motivate the pax to achieve this I get hauled in to explain myself. The never ending PA's are part of this :eek:

I agree the pax do "tune out" sometimes and cannot/do not distinguish between sales and safety PA's in flight.

Maybe we should have a better system......any suggestions?

lowcostdolly: I think you make an excellent point.

I confess that I am one of those passengers who really isn't interested in buying anything onboard, but I am always interested in an announcement from the flight deck and I always watch the safety demonstration.

It strikes me that on EZY and FR there are too many non-safety/operational PAs. I was led to believe that one of the reasons the captain makes a pre-flight announcement is so that passengers stand a better chance of recognising his/her voice in the event of an emergency. But unless you are alert, it can be difficult to distinguish all the automated/sales announcements from the captain's PA.

I have two suggestions:

1) make safety/operational PAs at a substantially higher volume so everyone can hear (it's been said before on here how frustrating it is when we can't hear you even when we want to!);

2) introduce these announcements with "This is a safety-related announcement" or similar wording to get people listening.

In my experience, the flights where passengers take the safety demo more seriously are those where the captain has emphasised - sometimes fairly firmly! - its importance.

Nick

Nicholas49
Nicz idea, but on the 737 the PA volume cannot be altered by the Flight Deck or Cabin Crew

Speaking of safety briefings;

MAS always state that one half of the lifejacket be inflated inside the aircraft which I always consider a bit strange.

Nine times out of ten I sit in 14A (no seat in front) next to the overwing exits and the other day I thought to myself I'd probably find it difficult to exit the aircraft with one side inflated.

Flybe G-FBEH
 

The Air Accident Investigation Branch report on the emergency landing of a Flybe Embraer ERJ 190-200 G-FBEH shows very graphically how passenger evacuation can go wrong .
Air Accidents Investigation: June 2010

Fokker 70, Friday Night, difficult to spot anyone who doesn't have a platinum or gold tag on their bags. Many people know the crew by first names and vice versa having done this trip almost every friday night and monday morning for months/years/decades... Several positioning crew including pilots. During the safety briefing around 3 or 4 people actually looked up to pay attention (The crew weren't any of those, despite obviously having come from a different/longhaul fleet, but then I would be more surprised if they did watch it). I guess at least 50% of the people onboard could recite the briefing word for word, I know I can...

Most who fly so often consider it as a bus ride from A-B and are enthralled in a book/sleeping/working and praying that they get home early, and really don't care about much else.

I'm not suggesting this is the correct way, but this is reality.

Korrol,

Same source as the Embraer, look at the G-CIVB incident in Phoenix. PAX basically panicking.......

http://svmomblog.typepad.com/photos/...lane_crash.jpg

If you look very closely at this picture of the ditching on the Hudson you'll see one of the passengers with his life jacket on upside down. Perhaps he was bored with paying attention to the SAFETY DEMONSTRATION, no????? :=:=:=:ouch::hmm:

EISNN
 

That is a possibility, or..
a) The a/c is ditching: panic, confusion, get it on any old way..
b) The safety brief wasn't given/received as it was intended..

Either way, the pax managed to exit with the bouyancy device, so regardless, something worked, whether that was the crew shepherding out the door, or the pax next to him trying to help.

Flight is the safest form of travel....

:D

Edited to add, or just once on your first flight, bit like crossing the road for the first time...

Lifejackets
 

Of course it's just possible that the passenger being made fun of here for apparently not having put his lifejacket on correctly could have shoved the bladders out of the way so that he could swim - otherwise he'd be continually turned onto his back.
http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2009/..._470x314,0.jpg
Meanwhile look at the woman - who is possibly a flight attendant - working on a leg injury. She's made the sensible decision not to inflate her lifejacket at all - because at that moment it would have got in the way. People aren't necessarily complete idiots - even when they're under stress.

Blah
 

A bloody 5 minutes of yer life and yer complaining.

Listen, I read somewheres (an NTSB or FAA report perhaps) that most aviation accident-related deaths so far could've been avoided if the passengers had known what to do in a case of an emergency, i.e. had read and understood the ruddy instructions and followed the demos. So my friendly advice to you is to pay attention next time, because hey, you never know, it may even save your life :ouch:

And this is coming from someone who flies HEL-TXL-HEL many times a year and _still_ reads the bloody card and watches through the demonstrations each and every time...

mslama,

I too fly a lot. But I can't say that I find the safety instruction card terribly helpful - partly because unless you know what it is trying to tell you, you're lost. For example, it shows the 'brace' position without saying what it is or when it's to be adopted.

So although it may be of some help to native language speakers, the safety demonstration is probably more use. Having said that, I was on one flight in the US some years back where FA's accent was so broad I couldn't understand her!

Am I alone in thinking that this is incredible? If your aircraft disintegrates in the cruise, will you really need that whistle? Is the brace position going to help when the aircraft plummets into a hotel on takeoff?

There are a few well-publicised cases where better discipline would have helped - but I have difficulty in reconciling the numbers killed in catastrophic accidents with avoidable deaths. This doesn't mean that one shouldn't give the CC the simple courtesy of watching them explain emergency procedures, of course.

SO

SO, that post is about as irrational and unhelpful as the fools logic that says seat belts in cars are pointless because "what happens if you get trapped by the belt". So you disregard something because it will not help in 2% of accidents and accept the fatality in the other 98%? That truly is bovine.

The statistic that is commonly bandied about is that in air transport accidents involving a fatality the average survival rate is 50%.

That suggests that it is very much the case that survival could be boosted by better awareness by pax.

ps. Everyone knows that aircraft don't plummet into hotels, only schools and hospitals. ;)

Agaricus bisporus

I would be indebted to you to learn where I brought into question the value of having passengers well briefed. Moreover, I explicitly stated that it's worthwhile paying attention to the safety tutorial.

The point that I was making was that I am unconvinced that msalama's assertion that most aviation deaths could have been prevented by passengers doing the right thing had good grounding. Furthermore, I would be happy to be refuted if you could render some substance to your claims.

Let me be quite clear about this. In a survivable accident, where the aircraft is intact and the personnel are still able to organise an orderly evacuation at 0 feet, the drill should be known. Whether it can be practised or not is questionable, but the number of people attempting to take their duty-free with them might be diminished. Slightly.

By and large, though, your chances of survival will depend upon whether you're at the back of an intact piece of aircraft, or if you're in First and the nose has broken clear, not if you know that you have a whistle.

SO
Sadly, Concorde went into a hotel

The point of this thread is ...
 

It seems to me that we can all agree that having all on board, particularly SLF, fully aware of a number of facts on safety issues could help save lives.

However, recent incidents: US Air in the Hudson, Air France into a ravine at Toronto, British Airways on ice at Heathrow - where no-one died does call into question the basic premis behind this theory.

I think this whole process / procedure needs a re-think. What isn't working and what is? How can things be improved?

I've got some ideas (such as posting safety videos for aeroplanes you will be taking, with a link from your e-ticket. Safety 'classes' run by airlines (some people would pay for this! etc.)) but no real answers.

In my view what is being done doesn't accomplish the goal.

Oxygen masks - how hard to pull?
 

The safety briefing says "pull the mask towards you to start the flow of oxygen...". But how hard? A gentle pull or a hard tug? And can you tell straightaway when it starts? Has anyone on here had to do it?

I've always found the oxygen mask bits to be the least informative - why not a video that shows the correct deployment (FAs rarely point to the right location from which the bags will come), putting them on (including pulling out the pin bit), and any aural or other clues that it is working ("please note, the bag does not inflate").

And when I say a video - I mean a realistic video with conditions in the airplane, while simulated, like they would be in an explosive depressurisation. (or is this a rare event itself?)

Explosive decompressions are rare. Rapid or slow decompressions are more common, but still not a common (thank goodness!) event. :)

Saw a video of a simulated explosive decompression once, was above 40,000 but can't remember exact altitude. The guy knew it was coming and had passed out before he had the mask on, all he had to do was reach up, grab the mask, pull it and put it on. He got about as far as stretching the elastic about to put over his head when he passed out and the safety guy already in a mask had to finish putting it on for him. Would love it if they did show that sort of thing as has been suggested above about showing a realistic video. Would probably freak a lot of people out if they knew what it can be like especially because the pilots are in the same plane also without masks on.

I had to resuscitate a man the other day who'd choked on some food. He went down like a sack of -er- spuds. It's astonishing how quickly it happens when you run out of O2 and it's unexpected. Sometimes you need to pull, on other types you just strap on. Another reason it's worth paying attention.

In the case of an explosive decompression, just think about all the crap that will suddenly become airborne - well, I mean airborne with reference to the interior of the aircraft. I can only think of three survivable, notable EDs; one was a fan blade that busted the fuselage when the pilots were playing with CBs, the UA flight which took a few pax out, and the convertible Hawaiian flight. There must be more.

It would be interesting to learn how many people have died because they've not known how to use their O2. Not that many, I think. There's that flight in Greece a few years ago where a slow leak incapacitated the pilots, and the FAs arrived too late.

SO

I'm not sure that any major overhaul would produce any measurable benefits.Even events that are similar (a/c type, weather conditions) are unique - because you have a set of pax who have never been through it before.

You cannot legislate for pax and what they will do. Even if you showed them worst-case scenarios, they would not take it in because that is human nature.

I have now read the CAA report on Flybe G-FBEH as suggested by Korrol, it gives me confidence that the system of oversight is working. The shortcomings in the evacuation have been noted but will probably appear again but in a slightly different form which will produce different results. As always in life, luck may not be on your side.

I wish to comment on the criticism of the gent wearing the life vest as a necklace in the picture of the water evac.

One explanation offered was for ease of swimming. That's one good point, as those of us who have tried to swim with buoancy assists (think water survival training, Navy) discovered. Perhaps this gent was more aware than some of his critics allow.

Another is that, absent risk of it slipping off his head if it isn't tight enough/sung enough under his jaw, the life vest in that configuration guarantees two things:

1. he floats
2. his head is above water, so he breathes.

In a survival situation, that's not a bad thing.

Downside: given the water temp that day, my estimation is that he'd not be able to huddle/curl to conserve body heat as effectively were he not in the raft, but as that's not part of the safety briefing for SLF, that point's probably moot.

I note that he's in the raft, so he's floating anyway. His personal flotation device is a back-up accessory at that point.

All said and done, I see little wrong with his adaptation of the tool, though I admit it looked curious to me when I first saw the picture.

I expect that most folks stick with the simple "this is how you put it on, wear it thuswise" guidance.

Whoops, my post count equals my age. :eek:

One would expect that the 'brace position' would be pretty self explanatory and it would be used when told to by the FA's :ok:

Seriously people, if you don't want to listen to the safety brief, don't. But watch out if you get in my way or the way of other, more reasonable people when we are trying to get out of a burning or sinking aircraft.

Number 34
 

While your comment may be relative to the OP, I don't think it relates to my, or many other comments.

I haven't said that I don't want to listen to the briefings, I said that the briefings don't appear to be suit the objective, and that a rethink is needed.

Is your comment limited to those that fail to listen to the briefing, or do they equally apply to the elderly and the infirm? Frankly I don't want to be on the same aeroplane as with people with your attitude.

As I think of this, the objective of the safety briefing is informational, to meet a minimal requirement of mentally preparing the attentive passenger to execute a few simple commands/steps in event of something going wrong.

I don't think it counts as training.

Do you agree?

If you want somebody to do something, training is often an effective means of transferring habits and behaviors.

Effective passenger training would include doing dry runs for donning life vests, for example, and a single dry run "how to get out of a tube via the emergency exit" events.

Hmmm.

People sit in the terminal for hours on end.

Why not have a "how to" booth for pax to practice donning the life vest for their flight? (PR reason: don't dwell on the negative, the airplane is just a faster bus to get you to see your cousin ... ) Get a ticket/coupon for having done so, while your fellow pax are still stumbling through security and full body cavity searches ... :p

Needless to say, most pax don't undergo training for things gone wrong, though crew do.

In your suggestion for a rethink, is training a path ahead?

Given how well the USAIR mishap/water landing was publicized, could various airlines consider that "since it might happen, drop by our little training booth and try on a life vest" with some sort of positive incentive to do so?

Free bag of peanuts?

I haven't come up with the sales pitch, but perhaps there is some room to encourage pax participation in training and being ready for the odd "it went wrong" event.

I just finished the NTSB report on USAIR 1549, and was interested to see how many people didn't get their life vests ... the briefings were apparently ignored or overlooked by a large portion of the pax surveyed.

*rubs head*

There is room for a process improvement here ...

Really? We are talking about people not listening to the announcements which led on to some PAX not paying attention to the safety briefing. So I don't see why my comments wouldn't be relative. The first paragraph was directed at you, then the rest was in general, if that clears it up.

Of course I would help the aged and disabled, like any normal human would. But I don't want some suit to get in both my way, and the way of others just because he was to busy reading the newspaper when the briefing was on. If you don't think they deserve a good bollocking, your a kinder man then most.

Could it not be the case that you could obstruct the orderly evacuation of the aircraft by doing so (unless it was just you and the biddy left onboard), and thereby become a 'suit' yourself?

I have never heard a briefing where any guidance was given apropos assisting other people - apart from with the mask. Is there anyone from CC land out there who could advise us? My assumption has always been that it is the job of the CC to empty the cabin as quickly as necessary and then mop up the strays.

SO

@ sea oxen

Some of the earlier comments in this thread use the term Crowd Control, which appears to fit your idea: CC to empty the cabin as quickly as necessary and then mop up the strays.

At the functional level, does that not suit an evacuation scenario?

A quick view from the front left seat:

The safety brief is mandated in The Air Navigation Order (CAP 393) regulations 53 and 54.

A real goody is Regulation 77:

Authority of commander of an aircraft

77

Lonewolf_50, I think you have the start of a very good idea.

Initially all carriers will recoil instinctively - but only because they have done so since the start of time. In a LH lounge, children will be glad to have something to do and can then - in emergency - be a help to their parents not a hindrance.

Thank you Paxboy
However, I do see a snag already in my idea. A given gate at an airport services many different kinds of aircraft, each with a possibly different seat, and a different life vest.

Caveat: a given airline may own an entire wing or concourse (my mind flies to the myriad of American Airline gates at DFW) of an airport, or lease it to the point that it is "X Airline's" concourse. For the majors at large airports, this might be more doable. A small kiosk with a variety of seats and life vests for trying out. For a smaller airline on tight margins, the expense may not make the cut for funding.

How to label such a small, fun, trainng kiosk?

Passenger prep kiosk, training ... how to get the most out of your flight ... marketing isn't my strongest suit, I grant you.

There is also the matter of dealing with the airport authority who wants as many segments/square feet of his airport area to be revenue producing ... what shop or pub is sacrificed?

While the trained passenger is more likely to respond well to things gone wrong, selling a cost benefit scheme in an industry where most flights are utterly uneventful for the passenger may be a bridge too far.

On Iberia the Spanish language briefing uses the phrase "tirar fuertamente" which translates as "pull strongly" (firmly). The English version, IIRC, just says "pull". I believe there is a secondary wire/cord to prevent the oxygen supply tube being ruptured if too much force is used.

Some carriers demonstrate the 'pull' with a strong double tugging motion to indicate that it's a firm pull. Some carriers have the pipe folded over with a red plastic clip on it. When you pull (we are told) the clip will spring off.

What happens when a passenger won't fasten his seat belt?
 

This was the dilemma facing the pilot of a private jet in the USA chartered to fly a well-known tv personality . Here's the newspaper report::-

Famous comedian was deemed as a safety risk by airline pilots : Abby Dentner

According to airline pilots, comedian Dave Chappelle was a safety risk during a flight. Chappelle was heading home to Ohio on a private jet when he allegedly freaked out and caused a disturbance. The Comedy Central host claims he had to use the restroom, but the crew onboard said Chappelle’s behavior was unacceptable.

The pilot of the private jet carrying the comedian decided to make an emergency landing because he couldn’t cope with Chappelle’s “bizarre behavior.” He boarded a private jet in New Jersey heading home to Ohio.
Chappelle, 36, caused a disturbance during the flight and wouldn’t put his seat belt on, causing the crew to divert the plane to Pittsburgh

I'm not making any comment on this incident either way except to say that I think there is an implied - and unwritten - contract between everyone on board an aircraft in which all agree not to act in a way which inconveniences or hazards anyone else.