While I didn't write it, the author is ABSOLUTELY right. While I hope that none of you ever experience an emergency evacuation, I also hope that if you do that you and your fellow passengers LISTEN and FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS from the flight attendants on board. THE NUMBER ONE REASON PEOPLE DIE IN AN EVACUATION IS BECAUSE PEOPLE TRY TO TAKE THEIR CARRY-ON BAGGAGE OFF THE PLANE. This blocks exits, slows the process and CAN PUNCTURE THE SLIDES. JUST GET OFF THE PLANE..you'll get your luggage back if it is salvageable.
I found this on the Forum in the Travel Section of USAToday.
No one knows yet why this happened, and it will be a long time before they do. Few people know the ins-and-outs of piloting any plane; most don't even know what arcane aviation language, full of acronyms and shoptalk and shorthand, is being used and fewer care.
What they SHOULD care about, and I hope DO care about, is what the average passenger can do to insure that, should they survive a crash, they also survive the evacuation.
The AA crash in Little Rock, and other incidents, taught us: You can survive the one, and not the other.
I'm the flight attendant that's posted a couple of times already, asking, "How many passengers exited this plane with their carry-on bags?" On one version of this story, on THIS website, the FIRST comment was from someone wondering how and when passengers would get their BAGGAGE.
People are in the HOSPITAL, folks!
And this leads me to my first point: CARRY-ON BAGGAGE IS FAR AND AWAY THE NUMBER ONE OBSTACLE TO EVACUATION. Number ONE.
That Air France evac a while back...where a full plane was evacuated during a fire in no time flat...that sort of thing isn't accomplished inside 90 seconds with everybody holding their overnight totes and laptop bags and purses and umbrellas and yakking on their cells as they stumble down the aisle: "Honey, guess what? We're having an emergency!"
Think about it. Flight attendants and passengers have died because evacuating passengers insisted, despite commands, on carrying bags to the evacuation door, then realized they can't fit or can't make it down with them, and abandoned them on the row nearest the exit. Bags pile up, and guess what? The flight attendants, and the handicapped people they're supposed to help off last, can't get off. Exits blocked.
When you're told, "Come this way. Don't take anything with you," it means YOU, and it means YOUR STUFF, which is, really and truly, no more important than anyone else's stuff, and certainly not more important than anyone else's LIFE, no matter who you think you are or how much you paid for your ticket or how important you know your stuff to be.
There is, on average, an evacuation in the US every ELEVEN days. And HALF of all the folks involved in one over a ten-year period ADMITTED (I wonder how many WOULDN'T admit it?) to taking a carry-on with them DESPITE COMMANDS TO DO OTHERWISE. That businessman with the pricey laptop case? He WILL struggle to grab it while you and your kids wait to evacuate a burning plane. He WILL. That grandmother with her Vegas cash in her Wal-Mart handbag? She will too. It's been proven over and over. Do you want one of these people sitting or standing or struggling with a bag between you and an aisle or a door in a smoky plane?
On every single plane I'm on -- either as a flight attendant or passenger -- I see people stow their bags under the seat in front of them -- as instructed -- for takeoff and landing, and then wrap the bag's strap around their foot, I guess because they're worried about losing it, forgetting it, having it roll away, having it stolen by another passenger, WHATEVER. Not between me and my child and a door, you don't! Not when I'm the one doing the compliance checks before takeoff and landing! This is one of the stupidest, most unsafe things I see people routinely do on a plane, and I see it EVERY DAY. Most of the time passengers want to argue with me about bag stowage more than any other issue. Right before takeoff is not the time most passengers want to be reminded that, say, due to a fuel spill or leak, we could be evacuating a burning plane in a matter of seconds. I try to explain in as calm and polite a way as I can. It's not always easy. "But it's my purse!" the lady with the 40-pound purse on her lap tells me. "It's my PURSE! Look, I'll put it under the seat in front of me but I'll wrap the strap around my neck (or foot)...see? Like this!" Sometimes the tiniest handbags have the longest little straps. Those straps will snag on every armrest during a NORMAL deplaning. What do you think they will do during an evacuation?
Don't take off your shoes during takeoff and landing. Don't sit there yakking on your cell or listening to music instead of to the safety demo. Don't take a bunch of pills and alcohol because you're scared of "something happening." If you were all that scared, you'd want your wits about you if it DOES happen. Don't wear ridiculous shoes or a bunch of nylon. I've been told that Continental's flight attendants remove their pantyhose when they have a "planned emergency" -- that is, when they KNOW there will be a problem and have time to prepare. The things melt and burn onto your skin. Remove your glasses and PUT THEM IN YOUR POCKET if you think there will be a bad landing, so that your eyes and face might remain uninjured and you can have the glasses in one piece for seeing your way out of the plane.
And if you just WON'T buy a seat for your infant's safety seat, or just WON'T make him or her sit there for takeoff and landing despite what the FA tells you, and insist on holding your baby on your lap, DON'T put your seatbelt around your baby too. I know it's counter-intuitive, but the FAs are supposed to tell you not to do this. There are really good reasons not to. Even when they tell people, they're ignored. That booster seat you think will help your older kid see out the window? They're not allowed on ANY plane, for some real good reasons.
It may be apocryphal, but I've been told that, in Little Rock, a young college kid evacuated, then returned to the burning plane repeatedly to grab the carry-ons. Can you imagine..."Mine is the one with the pink ribbon on the handle, under 12G!" And so forth? And what I've been told is, this kid died, overcome with smoke. Fetching people's socks and underwear! If you were sitting on a wrongful death jury, what would you decide the airline owed this young man's family? Anything?
Remember during the evac of the WTC on 9/11? There was a morbidly obese woman who used one of those scooter chairs....she was HAND-CARRIED down the stairs, holding up everyone behind her. Do you think she should be in an airplane's exit row, since that's the only seat that will hold her, due to the larger amount of legroom there? Even though she can't FIT through the exit row door? Even though she's slow moving? Do you know how many times I have to explain to argumentative passengers that the handicapped must be seated by a window, not on an aisle, so as not to impede the egress of others in the row, including perhaps the people who will help them? We brief non-ambulatory passengers and tell them, "You will be last off, when everyone around you is gone. I will come and get you." Does anyone think a planeload of able-bodied people ought to be stopped from evacuating while a quadriplegic is carried off? Is this realistic, fair or sensible? Handicapped people are first on, and LAST OFF, for lots of good reasons. But we are not allowed to limit the number of such folks on a plane. Do you want to ride on an aircraft with a tournament's worth of wheelchair basketball teams on board? Hmmm? Call your congressional representative. I'm a liberal, but some of this is PC run amok.
Something else I've heard about that Little Rock crash: No one on board over 70 got out. No one. And some of them were in exit rows. I don't care if you run marathons, and I don't care if you just had a check up, and I don't care if you've flown a gazillion miles with my airline......No one 70 or over needs to be in an exit row. Not when I've got law enforcement, and firefighters, active military members, and pilots and flight attendants (in civvies or in uniform) riding as passengers...not when I've got ANY of those sorts of folks to staff that door. And yes, our rule is that you have to be 16 to sit there. But on MY plane, it's 19. I picked 19 because that's the minimum age for flight attendants at my airline. Since my pilots have to retire at 60, I think 60 should be the upper age limit for an exit row. But hey, that's just me. I wouldn't want my son, over six feet tall and over 170 pounds at 16, to be responsible for opening that door if anything went wrong. That's a big burden to put on a kid that age should anything actually happen, now isn't it? And if you've got kids or a pet traveling with you, not only can you not have them in the exit row with you, you can't sit there yourself, either. The safety briefing card (which everyone should read every time they get on, because new information means the info on it changes periodically) tells you that no one with a responsibility to anyone else seated elsewhere on the plane (and that means your kids and your spouse and your pet and your elderly parents) is exit-row qualified. How many pet owners would reach under the seat in front of them and grab Fluffy or Fido, or grab the bag the pet is in, BEFORE opening the exit? Many if not most. That's why they can't sit there.
I see way too many people in exit rows who should NOT be there. They're there because they're good customers, maybe, or because they asked for it or because they were randomly assigned. But they are old, young, frail, sick, with a cane, hard of hearing, hard of seeing, acting silly, don't speak English, etc., and flight attendants are reluctant to move them because they're afraid they will get their airline sued. I say to my colleagues: The airline has rooms full of lawyers to deal with that. YOUR job is to evac that plane. Be worried about THAT.
Did you see the I-Report on CNN when that Hawaii-bound plane did an emergency evac in LAX last summer? Some goofy-acting college-age kids in the EXIT ROW decided it was a great time to get out their video camera and film themselves acting silly, talking about how they'd "always wanted to slide down the chutes" and about how now was their big chance. This kid may be legally old enough to occupy an exit row seat, but to talk like this during the emergency descent -- O2 masks dangling and other passengers panicking, praying, sobbing, etc. -- to film an I-Report for his 15 minutes of fame on CNN -- reprehensible! I would rather him be RE-looking at his safety briefing card. It was apparent this guy just did not take flying or the situation very seriously. He certainly did not take his exit-row responsibilities seriously. And CNN was happy to show it, with no comment given about how irresponsibly these exit row passengers were behaving. There was a Qantas crash landing with a hole in a jet's fuselage, where a fellow did the same thing; he wasn't in an exit row, but he was SUPPOSED to be bracing himself, and maybe preparing to evacuate himself, family members and others out of the plane. Instead he got out his video camera -- a potential projectile -- and filmed the whole thing for HIS 15 minutes. I'm to the point of fining people $10k, giving them 10 days in jail, banning them from commercial jet travel for a year and -- oh yeah -- you ain't going to wherever you were going on OUR airline, here's your ticket price back. Maybe that would get people's attention, because they're sure not listening to ME, the flight attendant.
Are we just getting so used to air travel that we don't think the worst will ever happen -- or at least, not to US? Or is that the RULES don't apply -- at least, not to us? Don't people know the rules exist for a reason -- a reason you may not want to think about? Every takeoff and landing is a potential evacuation. That's what the rules are for. Pilots are up front planning a routine flight. Flight attendants are in the back, planning for an orderly evac. Otherwise, why would we care where you stow your bag, or where the infant's safety seat is positioned, or that your bag's strap is wound around your seatbelt in a knot, or whether your seat is locked upright? (It's so the person behind you will have a more secure surface to brace against.) And the reason that those rules don't apply once we're level is that I'm not trained for a mid-air evac...they just somehow always seem to happen on the ground.
Folks snap off their belts and start interacting with their cells just as soon as the wheels touch the ground...right at the moment when an evac becomes a possibility, and when the chance of having a run-in with some other vehicle on the ground comes into play. Try to get them to understand what they're doing, and you're just the b*tchy flight attendant.
I have exit row passengers question why I want them to keep their window shade up for takeoff and landing. A couple of exit row passengers DID manage to open the door after a crash...smack dab into a fire, which they didn't see because their shade was down. Personally, I think ALL shades should be up for takeoff and landing.
People complain about being shown over and over how to use the seatbelt. Several survivors of crashes have reported that in their panic they kept trying to unlatch the seatbelt the same way they undo one in a car...searching with their fingers for that plastic button you depress...there isn't one on an airline seatbelt. The ONE woman in first class who was killed in that crash in Little Rock? She was asleep under a blanket with her seatbelt unbuckled. An FA was so worn out from having passengers become angry after being awakened for a seatbelt check, that she just skipped it. Either that, or the lady buckled up for the show-and-tell with the flight attendant, then unbuckled as soon as the FA walked away.
And then USAT has a chance to help educate the public about this stuff and it turns into an ego-fest for a couple of former/wannabe/would have beens.....Please, people. PAY ATTENTION.
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