“Greetings from the cockpit. This is your captain speaking.”
It’s a phrase frequent flyers know well.
Only this isn’t a pilot. And what follows isn’t the same ol’ in-flight safety talk.
Rather, it’s the opening salvo of a now viral YouTube video from travel journalist Doug Lansky, who delivers a near 7-minute “honest pre-flight safety demonstration … that airlines are afraid to show you.”
The tongue-in-cheek video has racked up 8.4 million views, an impressive achievement for a fake version of a safety briefing that most travelers ignore.
Lansky said he was inspired by a discussion he had with a pilot he sat next to on a flight years ago.
When the safety demonstration video began, “I noticed he wasn’t paying attention to it. And if you travel a lot, nobody really does,” said Lansky. “So I said ‘What would you say, if you could say anything?’ And he rattled off a bunch of stuff.”
Lansky said he then posed the same question to others in the aviation industry.
The video, he said, is “a composite of these different conversations I’ve had with pilots over the years — what would they say if they could do the safety test, and they weren’t bound by the legal team of the airline?”
Keeping it ‘real’
The premise of the video is that the aircraft’s entertainment system is down (“so we can’t show you the $2 million safety video that an ad agency did for us”), and thus the pilot is going to deliver a “real safety talk” to passengers.
The video advises passengers to practice unbuckling their seatbelt (“I know you all know how to use it but that’s because you’re not losing your sh*t right now”). Lansky said that research shows that when people are panicking — say they’re upside down or in a smoke-filled cabin — they tend to press the seatbelt buckle, as if it had a button like a car seatbelt.
“You really need to kind of visualize actually lifting the flap,” Lansky told CNBC Travel. “You need that muscle memory, and most of us have that more with a car than with an airplane.”
The video also stresses to passengers that they must leave their bags on the plane in the event of an emergency evacuation.
“In the event of something like an engine fire, we need you all off the plane in about 90 seconds,” it states. “My first officer and I will also be trying to get off this plane, and the last thing we want is to be cock-pit blocked by your roll-on.”
As to whether the crew will be working to maximize your time to move about the cabin — don’t bet on it, the video advised.
“We’ll probably keep the seatbelt sign on for nearly the entire flight because our flight crew doesn’t like to be bothered in the galley,” it states.
Is this true? “Oh yes,” a U.S. flight attendant with more than two decades of experience told CNBC Travel.
“Especially during [food or drink] service,” she said. “Or when someone decides to come stand over you and chat while you’re eating….
Read More: YouTube video about flight safety that airlines don’t want you to see