You always know that you are in a designed simulation, even if the fire is real. There is of course a great deal of effort that goes into designing training simulations that bring you as close to that stress as possible, but you never really get there. It is really interesting to try to predict how people will act in super high-stress situations. Otherwise on our trip, people were perfectly polite and friendly. I certainly know that there’s no way that my petite self could shove a bunch of six foot tall men out of my way. What I also recall is that no women would push their way to the front, perhaps because of lack of physical strength and height, and lack of courage. I remember the other (mostly older) women saying out loud that they couldn’t believe this, and also noticing some of the men turning around to see who was complaining. Women and children were left at the rear of the crowd. Instead, at the boarding announcements, there would be upwards of 100 people rushing towards the boarding gate.Įvery single time, adult men would push their way to the front of the crowd, I suppose so they could get the better seats. On the flights we took on SAS Airlines between Scandinavian countries, there was no assigned seating to board the planes. Civilians are plain scary.īack in 1998, I was on a vacation with a tour group to Scandinavia. At least when I flew for work, I generally knew how the other PAX had been trained and could predict their reactions reasonably well. You can predict that they will panic, and then things will get very nasty. It doesn’t make it untrue.įlying with civilians scares the shit out of me. This goes against the laws of “chivalry”. – Groups travelling together can fight off others to get to the exits. – Those who know where the exits are, go there without getting lost. – Men kill (or walk over same difference) women and children to get to the exits. The reason for this is that in a survivable crash, it gets very physical inside the cabin. Second is a passenger’s frequency of flying third is the size of group the passenger is in. In a takeoff/ landing crash, the most important predictor of passenger survival is gender. Very few crashes happen outside the take-off/ landing processes thousands of ground-km can intervene between a take-off and a landing. (Which is why the aviation industry quotes deaths per thousand passenger kilometres, not per take-off/ landing pair. Most crashes happen in landing or take-off. In an airplane it is calming information because it gives people the idea you may actually survive a crash. There’s some funny stuff out there, too, as in the second picture. I figured I could find some of these on the Internet, but it took a while to find just one, and you have to use the right search terms. It’s just that I’d be so frightened I don’t know if I could remember the instructions.)Ĭlearly, the answer to my silly title question is that companies don’t want to show people panicking in emergencies: it’s not the way we should behave, and showing scared passengers doesn’t inspire confidence in an airplane or ship! But it could make for some hilarious satirical safety videos and cards. (To their credit, Hurtigruten makes sure that every passenger knows exactly what to do and where to go in case of an emergency, and their equipment is top notch. I can tell you, though, that if the eight-tone “abandon ship” signal sounded on this cruise, and I had to put on one of those complicated “cold weather suits”, with a fancy and cumbersome life vest AND a fanny pack loaded with provisions (and long underwear and socks!), I don’t know if I’d be able to do it. They even look placid, and move with assuredness. That’s to be expected, especially if the plane is lurching, or an engine’s on fire, or the aircraft is plummeting downward.īut in the safety demonstrations, people putting on oxygen masks or bracing themselves or donning lifejackets are calm as cucumbers. People are crying, screaming, making what they think are their last phone calls, and so on. If you’ve ever seen a cellphone video of the interior of an airplane cabin in which people think they’re going to crash, it’s pandemonium. This question, which of course is fatuous, struck me because, owing to my recent flights and cruises, which exposed me to many safety demonstrations, I was struck by how calm people are in these videos and photos.
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