“Greetings from the cockpit. This is the Captain.”
This is a phrase familiar to frequent flyers.
However, this isn’t a pilot, and what follows is not your usual in-flight safety talk.
Rather, it’s the opening line of a now-viral YouTube video by travel journalist Doug Lansky, in which he shows off nearly seven minutes of “the kind of honest pre-flight safety demonstration airlines are afraid to show.”
The tongue-in-cheek video has been viewed 8.4 million times, an impressive achievement for a fake version of a safety briefing that most travelers ignore.
Lansky said the inspiration came from a conversation he had with a pilot sitting next to him on an airplane many years ago.
When the safety demonstration video started, “I noticed he wasn’t paying attention to it, and nobody who travels a lot pays attention to it,” Lansky said. “So I said, ‘If you could say anything, what would you say?’ And he started rattling off all sorts of things.”
Lansky then posed the same question to others in the aviation industry.
He said the video is “a compilation of different conversations I’ve had with pilots over the years: What would pilots say if they could do their own safety testing and weren’t tied down by the airline’s legal teams?”
Authenticity
The premise of the video is that, because the plane’s entertainment system is down (“we can’t show you our $2 million safety video produced by an ad agency”), the pilot will give a “real safety talk” to the passengers.
In the video, passengers are advised to practice unbuckling their seat belts (“I’m sure you know how to use your seat belt, but that’s because you’re not panicking right now.”) Lansky says research shows that when people panic (if they’re upside down or in a smoke-filled car, for example), they tend to press on the seat belt buckle as if there was a button like the one in a car seat belt.
“You have to visualize the flaps actually lifting,” Lansky told CNBC Travel. “You need muscle memory, and most of us have more muscle memory in a car than we do in a plane.”
The video also emphasizes to passengers that in the event of an emergency evacuation, they must leave their luggage on board.
“In the event of an engine fire or similar event, everyone must evacuate the aircraft within 90 seconds,” it reads. “My co-pilot and I will be evacuating the aircraft, but the last thing we want is for the cockpit to become blocked by a roll-on.”
As for whether flight attendants will go out of their way to maximize passenger movement time, the video advises passengers not to expect this.
“Because our flight crew do not like to be disturbed in the galley, the seat belt signs will remain on for most of the flight,” it read.
Is this true? “Absolutely,” a US flight attendant with more than 20 years of experience told CNBC Travel.
“especially [food or drink] “The service is awful,” she said, “or people stand in front of you while you’re eating and talk to you. It’s funny, people behave completely differently on an airplane than they do in normal life.” She requested anonymity because her employer has advised her not to make public statements to the media.
Lansky said he spoke to many people in the aviation industry and conducted his own research, drawing on his 20 years of experience as a travel journalist, to create the video.
Source: Doug Lansky
What about a life jacket under your seat? “Forget it,” the video advises. “A life jacket is less likely to save your life than a little pillow on an airplane.”
But here’s where our fake pilots might go too far, said a first officer for a major U.S. airline, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.
He said the video was “certainly made by someone who knows the ins and outs of flying an aircraft,” but he disagreed with the downplaying of life jackets.
As for the accuracy of the advice in the video, the captain said much of it was true.
“But obviously you’re never going to hear that from a flight crew,” he added.
In-flight injury investigation
Lansky said while researching the statistics cited in the video, he came across some startling numbers.
For example, passengers tend to worry about a crash or severe turbulence, but are statistically much more likely to be injured by their own baggage, he said.
“For many years, the number of people injured in the head by duty-free bottles falling from overhead bins after landing has far outnumbered the number of injuries caused by turbulence,” he said.
“That’s amazing!” a flight attendant who saw Lansky’s now-viral video told CNBC Travel.
Enviromantic | E+ | Getty Images
Lansky said drink carts were unlikely to cause the injuries, adding that flight attendants had told him they frequently hit passengers with body parts in the aisle.
He said he asked flight attendants how many times passengers bumped their elbows, knees and legs during long-haul flights.
The most common answer? About 20, he said.
“That’s from about 20 to 30 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 be hitting that many people on one flight.”
Opinions come “in waves”
The video wasn’t an immediate hit, said Lansky, who posted it about four years ago.
“It’s been a wave of progress,” he says. “When I first put it online, it got maybe a 200 views for a few months, and then someone found it and it just exploded.”
Doug Lansky is a journalist, author and speaker on travel and sustainable tourism.
Source: Doug Lansky
Lansky said he’s a big fan of late-night political shows like “The Daily Show” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers” because “they cut through the nonsense and make it entertaining, intelligent and real.” He said those shows influence the commentary he provides about the travel industry on his YouTube channel, “ReThinking Tourism.”
The video’s popularity has brought attention to Mr. Lansky’s career, a success that he says hits close to home for him as he now focuses on tourism consulting and speaking at conferences. He said the video’s popularity has earned him new respect from his daughter as a credible YouTuber.
“My teenage daughter was very critical of me for trying to do anything on YouTube,” he says, but when the video got 2 million views, “she was furious.”
“That was the best outcome.”
