Excuse Me For Sounding Like A Seinfeld Routine, But...

So I'm on a plane this afternoon, flying back from an extended holiday break with my wife's family in Florida, and I sit through -- for probably the ten-thousandth time -- the extended lecture on how to inflate the emergency life preserver in the event of a water landing. Like most of you, I'm sure, I've always thought that this speech -- not to mention the accompanying demonstration -- was a bizarre waste of time. How many successful commercial aircraft emergency water landings have occurred over the past twenty years? One? Two? Certainly no more than a handful, if memory serves. So the odds of you having to use that life vest are what -- a billion to one? Plane crashes are incredibly rare, but plane crashes where the plane goes down and then everybody suits up in their yellow vests and zooms down the inflatable slides, those are beyond rare.

On today's flight, for some reason, I started thinking about what would happen if you had safety advisories more in synch with the real odds of something going wrong on the flight. Terrorism aside, you're much more likely to have some nut flip out or drink himself to into an insane fury, which means they'd be better off teaching us how to administer a sedative than use our seat cushion as a flotation device. ("In the event that an intoxicated bond trader climbs on the drinks cart and starts defecating on it, please remain seated while the flight attendants locate the stun gun.")

What if other modes of transportation delivered similar safety speeches about equally improbable events? Your average commuter train is much more likely to derail than a plane to land on water, and yet they don't even give you seat belts on trains, much less teach you how to fasten them. Maybe every time you get on a bus, they should advise you what to do if someone plants a bomb onboard that will go off if the bus goes below 50 MPH. (I know, I know -- that was just a movie. But still.) I don't think it's preposterous to suggest that they'd actually save more lives over a ten year period if every flight used the flotation device instruction time to teach a crash course in CPR or the Heimlich maneuver instead. I'm sure you're much more likely to be sitting next to a guy who has a heart attack then you are to be crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Even if the plane did attempt an aquatic landing, you'd probably have time to run through the life preserver drill before you hit the water. (The ones where you don't have time usually don't leave any survivors.) And doing the drill right before the crash landing has one other added benefit: for once, people will actually pay attention to what's being said.

Comments

[brad]

I remember reading somewhere (wish I could remember the source) that no commercial plane has ever landed safely on water, and that in fact it can't be done in a jumbo jet. The water apparently would act as a tremendous drag on the belly of the plane, shredding it and tearing the plane apart.

[Maciej Ceglowski]

A little Googling suggests that brad is wrong. Here's a guy at Boeing on the subject of ditching:

http://yarchive.net/air/airliners/airliner_ditching.html

The engines come off, but the fuselage will remain intact.

A little more Googling finds just three cases of intentional ditching in the whole history of commercial jet aviation:

http://www.airsafe.com/events/ditch.htm

[Jack Hodgson]

The thing to remember here is -- and I don't think I'm being too cynical -- that with people, and with the government that responds to them (when it doesn't cost too much), there is an inverse correlation between how often something happens and how frightening it is.

For example, we are very frightened about airplane crashes, large and small. We give even the most minor of them lots of play in the media. Yet, more people will die in automobile accidents in the time it takes to read this comment, than will die in airplanes in 6 months.

I don't mean to bash cars here, or praise planes. I'm just saying that it's all human nature. A thing is only notable if it doesn't happen very often.

[Oliver Morton]

If I read Maciej's sources right, then flotation devices have saved at most 81 people -- assuming that all the surviors in the ditchings when the planes sunk were saved this way, which frankly seems unlikely. But since I previously thought that these devices had never saved anyone, they go up in my admiration. Of course, the number of cases of DVT that have been caused because you can't stretch out your legs due to the flotation device under the next person's chair remains to be calculated.

On British trains that run the track where one of the most infamous crashes of recent years took place they do now have safety leaflets in the seat pockets, but no announcements IIRC. And we now spend a seriously large amount on making the railways far safter than the roads for precisely the bif-rare-more-reaction reasons Jack mentions. The problem is that when you regularly shut down the railway to make it ever safer, people just go and die on the roads...

oliver

PS -- heard "Peckham" used to get a cheap laugh on the radio a few hours ago.

[Chad]

"there is an inverse correlation between how often something happens and how frightening it is"

Well, the U.S. military developed a fairly clever risk model some years ago (now used by insurance people and others interested in risk), which determines risk by creating a composite chart of severity against the probability of an occurance. So, for example, you may have a fairly low likelihood of blowing yourself up if you manufacture bombs in your spare time. On the other hand, one screw-up and its curtains for you. So the risk ratio would reflect these two considerations, ranking the activity along side those that have a high probability of occurance with low severity, like getting a cold.

Anyway, I think you're making a good point here, and probably the spiel has more to do with making people _feel comfortable_ about crashing than any real utility. But just imagine the amount of time that's wasted on this activity, multiply the time of every passenger of every plane and you have to wonder if that time couldn't be put to better use, like wasting time on posting random messages to blogs ;-)

[diseño web]

The crash of a plane have very low posibilities to happen.
The technology is very advanced but somethimes this inflict in negative form on the security of the transport.

[Mark Federman]

Actually, I've always marvelled at the floatation device announcement for flights that are entirely over-land.

And while we're talking about airplane safety, if mobile phones can supposedly interfere with navigational equipment, what about all those laptops with built-in wifi that are all looking for an access point?

Seriously, though, I experienced an emergency landing about 20 minutes into a flight (an engine had caught fire.) We were back on the ground (safely) at the originating airport in less than 3 minutes. The flight attendant had enough time to grab all the beverage service and hurl the full cups into a garbage bag, and then strap herself in for the fastest landing I've ever experienced. Certainly no time for safety demos!

[snr]

The purpose of the pre-flight lecture isn't to save lives in a crash. It's to keep people calm during the flight.

s/n:r

[diseño web]

Uhmmm, i think i don´t understand....

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[online casino]

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[bali]

Hi diseno
I don't know what that meant

[Robert]

The last flight I was on was in a particularly small twin prop plane and had the following pre-flight safety message:"In the event of a crash, well if we crash in this there wont be any survivors, but if you're lucky enough the doors are at the front!".
Seems she was well aware of the futility of it all.

[wonderyak]

hello :)

[Roone G]

Seems nobody here. Eh. Back!.

[Rod]

Good article Steve! Best regads from Poland

[Jenny]

Dull...