“Greetings from the cockpit. This is your captain speaking.
This is a saying familiar to frequent flyers.
Only this isn’t a pilot. What follows is a little different than a flight safety talk.
On the contrary, this is a YouTube video now going viral From travel journalist Doug Lansky, who offers a nearly seven-minute “honest pre-flight safety demonstration…that airlines are afraid to show you.”
The tongue-in-cheek video has already racked up 8.4 million views, an impressive achievement for the fake version Safety briefings that most travelers ignore.
Lansky said he was inspired by a discussion he had with a pilot he was sitting next to on a flight several years ago.
When the safety demonstration video began, “I noticed he wasn’t paying attention. If you travel a lot, no one really does that,” Lansky said. “So I said ‘If you could say something, what would you say?’ and he just rattled off a bunch of stuff.
Lansky said he then asked the same question to others in the aviation industry.
He said the footage was “an amalgamation of different conversations I’ve had with pilots over the years – if they could do a safety test and weren’t subject to the airline’s legal team, what would they say?”
Keep it “real”
The premise of the film is that the plane’s entertainment system is malfunctioning (“so we can’t show you the $2 million safety video the advertising agency produced for us”), so the pilot will give a “real safety speech” to the passengers.
The video advises passengers to practice unbuckling their seat belts (“I know you all know how to use it, but that’s because you haven’t lost your mind yet”). Lansky said studies show that when people are panicked — such as when they’re upside down or in a smoke-filled cabin — they tend to press the seatbelt buckle as if it had a seatbelt like a car seatbelt. button.
“You really have to imagine what it would look like to actually have the flaps raised,” Lansky said. CNBC Travel. “You need muscle memory, and most of us have a better memory of cars than airplanes.”
The video also emphasizes to passengers that luggage must be left on the plane in the event of an emergency evacuation.
“In the event of an engine fire, etc., we need you to exit the aircraft within approximately 90 seconds,” it reads. “My co-pilot and I will also be trying to exit the aircraft, and the last thing we want is for the cockpit to be blocked by your roll-off vehicle.”
As for whether the crew will do their best to maximize your time walking around the cabin, don’t bet, the film advises.
“We may keep the seat belt sign on for almost the entire flight as our crew do not like to be disturbed in the galley,” it said.
Is this true? “Oh, yes,” said an American flight attendant with more than two decades of experience. CNBC Travel.
“Especially during (food or drink) service,” she said. “Or someone decides to stand next to you and chat while you’re eating. It’s funny – people behave very differently on airplanes than in normal life.
To create the video, Lansky said he spoke with many people in the aviation industry and conducted his own research, drawing on his 20 years as a travel journalist.
Source: Doug Lansky
Where’s the life jacket under your seat? “Forget it,” the video advises. “They’re less likely to save your life than those little airline pillows.”
But here our fake pilot may have gone too far, said a co-pilot at a major US airline who asked to remain anonymous because he, too, was not authorized to speak to the media.
He said the film was “certainly written by someone who knows the ins and outs of airline flying” but he disagreed with the abandonment of life jackets.
As for the accuracy of the film’s suggestions, most of them are true, the first captain said.
“But you obviously never actually hear that from the crew,” he added.
Studying Inflight Injuries
Lansky said he discovered some alarming numbers while researching the statistics cited in the film.
For example, passengers often worry about crashes and severe turbulencebut statistically they are more likely to be injured by their own luggage, he said.
“Over the years, more people have been injured on the head when their duty-free bottle fell from the overhead compartment and hit them after landing than any form of turbulence,” he said.
“That was awesome!” one flight attendant told CNBC Travel after watching Lansky’s now-viral video.
Environmental Protection | Electronics + | Getty Images
Lansky said beverage carts were another unlikely source of injuries, adding that flight attendants told him they often beat passengers whose body parts invaded the aisle.
He said he asked flight attendants how many times they hit passengers on their elbows, knees and feet on long-haul flights.
The most common answer? About 20, he said.
“It takes about 20 to 30 different flight attendants,” he said. “They’re not going to break a knee or an elbow or a wrist every time, but they’re going to meet so many people every time they fly.”
Opinions come in “wave after wave”
Lansky, who released the film about four years ago, said the film wasn’t an immediate success.
“It’s kind of like one wave after another,” he said. “When I first put it online, it had about 200 views within a few months, and then someone discovered it and it went crazy.”
Doug Lansky is a journalist, author and speaker on travel and sustainable tourism.
Source: Doug Lansky
Lansky said he was a “huge fan” ofdaily show“, “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and other nightly political shows because “they cut through the bullshit and make things fun, smart and real. Shows like this shape the travel industry commentary he provides on his YouTube channel”Rethinking tourism,” he said.
The viral video drew attention to Lansky’s career, which now focuses on travel consulting and conference speaking, but he said its success is closer to home for him. He said that as a verifiable YouTuber, he earned his daughter’s new respect with one viral video.
“My teenage daughter makes it hard for me to do anything on YouTube,” he said. But when the video reached 2 million views, “her jaw dropped to the floor.”
“This is the best possible outcome.”
