Ever since George Carlin ridiculed the airline safety lecture, I smile when I hear one. But during a recent flight, I noticed something new.
One of my favorite routines from the late comedian George Carlin involved the famous airline safety lecture. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it on this YouTube clip. (The language is definitely NSFW!)
He makes fun of the whole lecture, calling it his “favorite part of the plane ride.”
“I listen very carefully to the safety lecture, especially that part where they teach us how to use the seat belts,” he said. “Imagine this! Here we are a plane full of grown human beings, many of us partially educated, and they’re actually taking time out to describe the intricate workings of a belt buckle.”
We lost Carlin 16 years ago, but I still think of him every time I hear that safety lecture begin.
Sometimes, though, some flight attendants do it a bit differently. Take this one, for example. To say that the flight attendant went “off script” a bit with this particular airline safety lecture would be the ultimate understatement:
But if you watch the clip for a couple of minutes, you’ll notice something interesting: Everyone was paying attention!
I noticed something different on my most recent flight
Most of the time, I fly Delta. I seem to be one of the few people who doesn’t have a horror story involving that airline. But this time around, for a flight to Florida for a friend’s wedding, Delta’s airfare was was about $300 higher than American Airlines’.
Well, I haven’t had a bad experience with American, either. So I booked my flight with them. (Sorry, Delta: Offer a more reasonable price next time.)
In any case, there was no opportunity for any creative ad-libs on the part of the flight crew. For the four American Airlines flights I took, the safety lecture was prerecorded.
Airplanes and airplane public address systems are not known for their acoustical qualities. And most flight attendants who speak into the telephone that doubles as a microphone think, for some reason, that they need to smush their lips into the mouthpiece and somehow believe we’ll be able to understand them.
But on this flight, that prerecorded safety lecture sounded like it was performed by a voice actress in a recording studio. It was clear. It was easy to understand.
And most people didn’t pay much attention, even when the flight attendants still dutifully demonstrated the seat belt, the life vest or the drop-down oxygen masks. They went through the same motions; the only difference was the prerecorded message.
I don’t know whether all airlines are moving to this. I recall seeing some flights with monitors in every seat back in which the safety lecture is done on a video. People didn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to that one, either.
At least with the live announcement, there’s room for a little creativity. If that makes people listen better, I’m not so sure that the lack of a more polished presentation is a bad thing.
